“But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die”

“The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.”

“Contemplating the adolescence through which we scorned the wrong, some of us must wish … that we could be born old, and grow younger and cleaner and ever simpler and more innocent, until at last, with the white souls of little children, we lay us down to eternal sleep.”

“She was the one who was supposed to have walked with him through different lives, being born and loving and dying and being born again. They'd been born for each other, to help each other grow and blossom and discover and evolve.”

“As we walk back, it feels like the city is engulfing us. Adrenalin still pours through our veins. Sparks flow through to our fingers. We've still been running in the mornings, but the city's different then. It's filled with hope and with bristles of winter sunshine. In the evening, it's like it dies, waiting to be born again the next morning.”

“To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.”