“This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.”

“I tried to put the displacement between parenthesis, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history, personal and public history. But I see nothing except commas. I want to sew the times together. I want to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all the presents to all absences, to attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now.”

“I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.”

“We don't attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to tbe true in the moment.”

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

“Why aren't you at school?" I ask suddenly. "It's a holiday," he says, a little too quickly."Right. What holiday would that be? National Talk Out of Your Ass Day?”