"That’s what’s missing, she thought. Everyone in the city is so passionate about things. Here they are only passionate about their religion. They’ve lost everything else."

“You really can’t choose the people you’re going to like.”

“We are all tourists in each others’ lives. We all have monuments and ruins, places of strange beauty and forbidden sites chained off and locked securely so that no visitors can get in. And none of us has the guidebook to anyone else, or even the list of most commonly used phrases. We just have to get along the best we can.”

“Maybe art couldn’t survive it if was sponsored by the government. Maybe art always had to be subversive.”

“She felt that she had seen beneath the mask of the world, and she could not quite believe in that mask again.”

“You think you know what your life will be like thirty years from now and suddenly you’re doing something you couldn’t have planned five minutes ago.”

““A novel?” André laughed. “The novel’s dead—don’t waste your time. The novel takes a small—oh, infinitely small—cut-and-dried section of so-called reality and calls it art. Your life is art. Don’t waste it trying to write a novel.”