“There were people everywhere on the city street, but the stranger could not have been more alone if it were empty.”

“Lima frightened him, it was too big, you could lose yourself in it and never find your way home; the people on the street were total strangers.”

“Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing… Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits.”

“Now they were as strangers; worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.”

“With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest. And also the lives of the thousands upon thousands of other, unknown, people passing by on the street or in the Métro passageways at rush hour.”

“A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.”

“They were empty gestures, the kind it was beginning to seem that these people were full of.”

“They were inlove, but they hadn't been lovers; they were friends and yet also strangers for so many years”

“Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.”

“The streets were dark with something more then night.”