“There are those who wake up each morning to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake up only because we have to. We live in the shadow of every neighborhood. We own little corner stores, live in run-down apartments that get too little light, and walk the same streets day after day. We spend our afternoons gazing lazily out of windows. Somnambulists, all of us. Someone else said it better: we wake to sleep and sleep to wake.”

“We would meet outside the same wine bar we had gone to on our first date, and from there we would wander through the city for five or six hours since neither one of us had a private place that we could retreat to. Walking out in the open for so long only helped to draw us closer. There was too much space on the avenues, and the side streets were often too crowded with people and cabs hurrying to cut across town. To counter that we held each other's hands and arms, ribs and waists.”

“It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what's waiting for us now that we've returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moments like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made.”

“You will never disappear," I said. "Even if it may feel like you have at some point. We're going to remain a part of each other's lives for much longer than we think. There's nothing we can say or do to change that.”

“All we truly know when we wake up in the morning is that we have the day in front of us to live.”

“She always thought Americans were too territorial. 'All those fences and flags,' she had once said, seeing very little difference between the two.”

“It's hard sometimes to remember why we do anything in the first place. It's nice to think there's a purpose, or even a real decision that turns everything in one direction, but that's not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives.”