“I really love this city. It’s so very beautiful. It’s so multidimensional.People say it has a darkness and a decadence, which it tries to hide; they say it’s full of the pretentious and opulent trying to strangle the dark reality. But that’s true for most of the other great cities too. . . .There is a soul here . . . and that soul is as pure as the heat of the sun that shines down on it and the rain that falls to purify it.”

“It’s not that easy,” said the merchant. “The words are there, but they like to hide from the sun. I can’t say I blame them for doing so, for the sun is such a bother, lighting up everything, revealing everything. Some things need keeping in the dark. This book knows much about that.”

“I just do. That’s why it’s love—it’s unconditional. Whether you commit a mistake or a hundred, I would still love you. They say the most romantic kind of love is the unfinished kind. The kind that will forever burn and mark your soul—you’ve bewitched me, body and soul. I love you—and whether you do or don’t feel the same, my love is withstanding and unequivocal.”

“Sometimes it’s a sort of indulgence to think the worst of ourselves. We say, ‘Now I have reached the bottom of the pit, now I can fall no further,’ and it is almost a pleasure to wallow in the darkness. The trouble is, it’s not true. There is no end to the evil in ourselves, just as there is no end to the good. It’s a matter of choice. We struggle to climb, or we struggle to fall. The thing is to discover which way we’re going.”

“It’s not that I can’t fall in love. It’s really that I can’t help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can’t distinguish between what’s platonic and what isn’t, because it’s all too much and not enough at the same time.”

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”