“Charm is an essence, not a façade.”

“Safety - like light - is a façade. Underneath, the whole world is drenched in darkness.”

“People often believed they were safer in the light, thinking monsters only came out at night. But safety – like light – is a façade.”

“Employment is a condition of being. Unemployment is a period of transition. We bravely present ourselves as having value. It's a façade of projected personal confidence. And a stomach quivering with fear.”

“We spend so much time creating a façade of what we want to project to the world, we almost forget what we ourselves are truly about in the process.”

“And then Lihn got out of the swimming pool and we went down to the ground floor, and we made our way through the crowded bar, and Lihn said, The tigers are finished, and, It was sweet while it lasted, and, You’re not going to believe this, Bolaño, but in this neighborhood only the dead go out for a walk. And by then we had reached the front of the bar and were standing at a window, looking out at the streets and the façades of the buildings in that peculiar neighborhood where the only people walking around were dead. And we looked and looked, and the façades were clearly the façades of another time, like the sidewalks covered with parked cars that also belonged to another time, a time that was silent yet mobile (Lihn was watching it move), a terrible time that endured for no reason other than sheer inertia.”