It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

His contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat one another with the circumspect tenderness of comrades who are amputees, for we were surrounded by the most moving images of evanesecence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children. But the most moving of these images were the intagible relfections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.

we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.