-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

All wisdom ends in paradox.

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.