“Denied a Lenin and deprived of Napoleon, France retreated into the last and, we must hope, indestructible redoubt, the world of Astérix. The postwar vogue for Parisian thinkers barely concealed their collective retreat into Hexagonal introversion and into the ultimate fortress of French intellectuality, Cartesian theory and puns.”

“If you retreat in response to desire rather than deprivation, the deprivation may never come.”

“Our challenge as introverts is to adopt the attitude, based on the introversion assumption, that your need to retreat requires no explanation—it is self-evident.”

“They're from France, Ruby said, Vogue magazine. They only speak French except for fuck you.”

“It was too late to retreat - the world exists only because it is always too late to retreat.”

“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”