“If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?”

“You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?”

“He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?”

“If you listen, you can hear it.The city, it sings.If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of the street, on the roof of a house.It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.”

“He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.”

“All the emails I get these days start with sorry but I've been so busy, and I don't understand how we can be so busy and then have nothing to say to each other.”

“the architecture student from number eleven presses his face to the glass and looks at the way the light falls through the water, he thinks about a place where he worked in the spring, an office where they had a stack of empty watercooler bottles against the window, and how he would sit and watch the sun mazing its way through the layers of refraction, the beauty of it, he called it spontaneous maths and he wanted to build architecture like he that, he looks at the row of houses opposite and he pictures them built entirely of plastic and glass, he imagines how people's lives might change if their dwellings shook with endless reflections of light, he does not know if it's possible but he thinks it's a nice idea”