Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

I'm of the opinion that the real is imagined and the imagined is quite real. The real is imagined, in the sense that we shape our stories, so anything that even happens on the news gets shaped in a certain way and gets a texture, and that the imagined can be real.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.