“These stories, I realized, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city but as a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city. That's how we lose the city - that's how our knowledge of what the world is is taken away from us - when what we know is blasted into rubble and what is created in its place bears no resemblance to what there was and we are left strangers in a place we knew, in a place we ought to have known.”

“a city is all about how you look at it”

“What appears strange and complex becomes stranger and more complicated once you begin to investigate it. That's the true nature of the world.”

“for the first time I am confronted with the fact that places and people are like things: both made of memories and meaningful to us in the same way: we construct ourselves in our conversations with them.”

“My dear, you are not one person. You have many people in you, and each one can ask only some kinds of questions.”

“Now, standing here, it is clear as day: more than anything else, you want to find words for what you feel and think and everything that is dark. And then this terrifying thought hits you: Yes, your father wrote poetry to find a language for his wounds. Yes, you in your own way have become your father”

“We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.”

“You see, my son, a city is all about how you look at it...We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.”

“You just gave her an angry glance in return. It was the kind of glance that children give their parents when they know exactly the kind of total power they have over them and when the temptation to shatter them with one word, one phrase is overwhelming, but something – just the vague knowledge perhaps that the mess they create would be too great to gather – holds them back.”

“Reasons were invented, and stories were reasons that allowed us to connect ourselves to the world, to compose ourselves in ways that others could read. Fragments were true but we needed stories greater than fragments. We needed stories in order to imagine the mad world we lived in.”

“Once you tell somebody a story, you are all in the same world and you can all speak to each other about the same things and understand the same things.”