“...cold, still, lookin a little uncomfortable in death as if they weren't quite used to it yet.”

“I had never felt like that before, as if there were a sort of curse, a merciless force in the light that shone on a world where life is borken and lost, where each new day takes something from the day that precedes it, where suffering is inmovable...”

“Now I know that without mirrors we are different, we're not really the same...Maybe they had noticed us looking worriedly at other people's faces, as if we wee trying to see in them what we had become”

“Maybe it was Roumiya's beauty that drove me away, her silent beauty, her eyes that seemed to be looking through everythig and draining it of all meaning.”

“She carried the burn of the sun on her body. It was for all of those wasted, dull years.”

“Most people don't know how to ask the right questions. Mondo knew how to ask questions, just at the right time, when you weren't expecting it. People paused for a few seconds, they stopped thinking about themselves and their own business, they thought, and their eyes seemed to blur, because they remembered asking those questions themselves, long ago.”

“Thinking! Thinking! The process should no longer be merely this feeble flurry of hailstones that raises a little dust. It should be something quite different. Thinking should be a terrifying process. When the earth thinks, whole towns crumble to the ground and thousands of people die.Thinking: raising boulders, hollowing out valleys, preparing tidal waves at sea. Thinking like a town: that's to say: eight million inhabitants, twelve million rats, nine million pints of carbon dioxide, two billion tons. Grey light. Cathedral of light. Din. Sudden flashes. Low-lying blanket of black cloud. Flat roofs. Fire alarms. Elevators. Streets. Eighteen thousand miles of streets. 145 million electric light bulbs.”