“I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room.”

“Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit.”

“They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.”

“I read Borges, Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him . . . he was a blind man who see better than anyone”

“I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves.”

“I drink to not giving a damn . . .”

“He wanted to limit me to his own investigation of who I was . . .”