She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?

Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.

It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.