I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father's farewell; my spite was sharp as broken glass.

Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.

Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.

He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.

This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.

With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.

Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.