“For me parks are good when first of all, they're not impeccable, and when solitude has appropriated them in such a way that solitude itself becomes an emblem, a defining trait for walkers, sporadic at best, who in my opinion should be irrevocably lost or absorbed in thought, and a bit confused, too, as when one walks through a space that's at once alien and familiar.”

“Because sometimes the memory of what one has read tempers the actual experience, and the experience itself becomes, more than something physical, the realization of the reading...”

“In general, I know that when speaking of private and opposing worlds, one tends to refer to divided, sometimes even irreconcilable facets of personality or of the spirit, each with its corresponding secret value and its psychological, metaphysical, political, or simply practical- or even pathological- content. But in my case there was neither a moral nor existential disjunctive, what was more, I saw that my two worlds weren't separated in an equal or reciprocal way; neither did one world linger in the shadows or in private as the flip side of the other, the visible one, who knows which; nor would they seek to impose themselves over the other or to merge as one, but force or not, as tends to occur in these cases. Nothing of the sort; they seemed a nearly abnormal example of coexistence, of adaptive tendency and of absolute absence of contrasts. I took all this into consideration, and it seemed worrisome and insoluble. . . But an instant later I resigned myself, thinking that when all was said and done I ought to bow to these conditions, because just as we cannot choose our moment to be born, we also know nothing of the variable worlds we'll inhabit.”

“Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle?”

“… to walk is to enact the illusion of autonomy and above all the myth of authenticity.”

“[Tuco is in a bubble bath. The One Armed Man enters the room.]One Armed Man: I've been looking for you for 8 months. Whenever I should have had a gun in my right hand, I thought of you. Now I find you in exactly the position that suits me. I had lots of time to learn to shoot with my left.[Tuco kills him with the gun he has hidden in the foam.]Tuco: When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk.”

“We always ate with gusto...It would have offended the cook if we had nibbled or picked...Our mothers and zie [aunties] didn't inquire as to the states of our bellies; they just put the food on our plates.'You only ask sick people if they're hungry,' my mother said. 'Everyone else must eat, eat!'But when Italians say 'Mangia! Mangia!' they're not just talking about food. They're trying to get you to stay with them, to sit by them at the table for as long as possible. The meals that my family ate together- the many courses, the time in between at the table or on the mountain by the sea, the hours spent talking loudly and passionately and unyieldingly and laughing hysterically the way Neapolitans do- were designed to prolong our time together; the food was, of course, meant to nourish us, but it was also meant to satisfy, in some deeper way, our endless hunger for one another.”