“A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.”

“I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.”

“Architecture is the learned game; correct and magnificent of forms assembled in the light”

“Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.”

“One catastrophe at a time...”

“You couldn't think of after, you only thought of now, and come to think of it, you didn't do that either- you were left with pools of memory, each stranded from the next by time pulling forward like a tide.”

“What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? (...) To know, really and absolutely know, that there's a Divine Being not set in time or space who reads your thoughts better than you ever did, and probably before you even have them? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the path of bullets, decides which of his children will die, or have their legs blown off, or make a few hundred million on Wall Street, depending on today's Grand Design? (ch. 14)”