“I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.”

“He was one of those people who made you feel like they either didn't know or didn't care that you were in the room and if they ever did acknowledge your existence it was bizarrely score one to you, and twenty years later they'd tell you they'd always had a crush on you but never had the courage to say anything and you'd tell them, What? I didn't even think you liked me? and they'd say, Are you crazy? I just never knew what to say!”

“...because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they'd never admit in normal conversation. It's a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.”

“There's gonna be times when people tell you that you can't live your dreams, this is what I tell them, Never Say Never.”

“You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.”

“The interesting thing about cities isn’t what they do when people are looking,” Ben says. “It’s what they do when they think nobody’s looking. Like, the shit the city is proud of? The shining skyscrapers downtown, the sports stadiums, the public art? You can’t judge a city by that. That only tells you what the rich people are doing on a good day. It’s what people do on a bad day—a bad day when there are no security cameras watching—that tells you what you really want to know. It’s how people act during a blackout, a hurricane, or a siege that tells you the truth about a city.”