“Conrad,Nabokov, Naipaul - these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My imagination however, requires that I stay in the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.”

“I have become so accustomed to think “scientifically” that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him.”

“I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.”

“You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening...”

“It's kind of strange...All these so-called myths and fables. Everyone seems to have the same ones. They cross cultures and continents. Everyone has their own versions of unicorns, witches, even the Fates. Now we know why. Because they're real.”

“I look through the window at the huge valley lit up with different colors. The town is cradled by the dark mountains. From afar it looks as if nothing can get in or out, but judging by the stillness of the view it's as if the citizens have made peace with it and have settled without worry into their insular but protected haven each evening. There are people in the world, I imagine, who are born and die in the same town, maybe even in the same house, or bed. Creatures without migration: have they not lived a life because they have not moved? What of the migratory los González, moving from one place to another and marking every stopping place with angst? What kind of alternative is that? For once my father and I are thinking thinking the same way, sharing a similar yearning for our starting points to have been different, for our final destination to be anything other than the tearful, resentful arrival it is likely to be.”