“Because the problem with having tried something new and amazing was that you could never go back and take the same pleasure in the thing you used to enjoy. You could never erase the awareness that somewhere out there was a better experience you weren't having. You knew you were eating a canned biscuit after you'd tried a fluffy, tender homemade one with a crisp buttered top, the whole of it split open and doused with honey.”

“A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.”

“If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?”

“Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?”

“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”

“The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality. But Nigora knew this was not true. Because she was going to act out of character, She was going (thought Nigora) to be herself. And yet: how could she? How could she?”