Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

This is not the “relativism of truth” presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist’s cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural...

The world is a cruel place, Petrosinella, and it wounds the weak.

I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.

Every day we make the whole world new… Or else grow old.

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

All knowledge hurts.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

There’s truths you have to grow into.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

Elisabeth had not had her future and her parents had not had theirs, there was nothing to this so-called future which was always promised to the young.

All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role – grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with...

Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don’t have it.

I wish they’d conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn’t. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there...

My hopes were all dead — struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming...

Jerusalem has a way of disappointing in tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to this city’s asylum,...