“There's nothing in this courtyard, after all, that wasn't here in 1977; maybe it's not this year but that one, and everything that follows is still to come ... For if the evidence points to anything, it's that there is no one unitary City. Or if there is, it's the sum of thousands of variations, all jockeying for the same spot. This may be wishful thinking; still, I can't help imagining that the points of contact between this place and my own lost city healed incompletely, left the scars I'm feeling for when I send my head up the fire escapes and toward the blue square of freedom beyond. And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one? Who among us--if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks--is ready even now to give up hope?”

“There were two options—call the foul or don't—and either way, he would lose, but there was a thrill here in this moment when actual combat might have replaced the shadowboxing he'd been doing for months now with every last person he loved.”

“Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn't: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place.”

“And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?”

“The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.”

“An actual artist, living right under her nose.”

“That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.”

“There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.”

“And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?”

“One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?”

“College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.”