“People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.”

“[The shells] do not have the meaning they once did, but, as Swann said in Remembrance of Things Past, "even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them." (22)”

“The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. .. Even in the Eternal City (Rome), says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”

“Once we are involved in a relationship, there is no longer any such thing as a minor detail.”

“I have no taste for work any longer, I can do nothing more except wait for night.530: Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.”

“It was unhealthy to get too attached. Such things were best reserved for people who had a life expectancy”