“ruin had been the original blueprint and men and women had lived here only in a necessary but intermediate stage of the execution of the grand design”

“Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with”

“The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.”

“In his diabolic solitude, only the possibility of love could awake the libertine to perfect, immaculate terror. It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women.”

“It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all. I had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel.”

“I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.”

“There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.”