“the city is cold and hard like that bike I stole from your front yard.”

“Good friends, beware! the only life we knowFlies from us like an arrow from the bow,The caravan of life is moving by,Quick! to your places in the passing show.”

“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.”

“You did too! You stole my bike, A-HOLE!" I yell out. Jeez, I'm like a Chatty Cathy Doll: just pull my string and I'll say, "You stole my bike, A-HOLE!”

“But, you see, what I like about you is not that you feel foreign. And I don't think you ever did feel entirely foreign. But I like the fact that something about you still resists, refuses to become familiar, remains invincibly foreign. And it means that when I'm with you, I'm always rubbing up against a foreign element, something mysterious, irreducible, ever present, and full of happiness…It makes the way you walk and some of the things you do feel foreign to me for a moment. Your voice, on the end of the phone, from time to time: foreign. Your perfume, its vetiver fragrance, your own delicate smell: both foreign. Your subtly sinuous thought processes are so foreign to my own meanderings, and yet clearer and sharper. Of course you are not a foreigner, but how I value this foreignness in you. Perhaps keeping that foreign element is the secret.”

“Hearts don't really get broken, but if you practice too hard with them, they can get quite hurt. It feels like they won't get better, but they do.”

“I do believe that you can never know yourself let alone the person next to you let alone the person halfway across the world. Yet at the same time I believe there is nothing like fiction to fully thrust you into someone else s consciousness.”