“She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.”

“Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”

“People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.”

“The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.”

“I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.”

“If you think of the world without people it's about the most perfect thing there ever is. It's all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up. It's like you got Aretha Franklin in your bedroom and she's just giving it her all, she's singing just for you, she's on fire...and then all of a sudden out pops Barry Manilow from behind the curtains.”

“He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.”