"We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music."

--"Something That Needs Nothing"

"We learned to be discreet. It helped that nobody really cares abpout anyone but themselves anyway. They check to make sure you aren't killing anyone, anyone they know, and then they go back to what they were saying about how they think they might be having a real breakthrough in their relationship with themselves."

--"Making Love in 2003"

 

"I brushed my new short hair with the same long strokes I had used for my old hair, accidentally hitting the brush against my shoulders. It was a delicate, new strangeness, and I held on to it like a candle, hoping it would lead me to an even newer, stranger strangeness. Or perhaps I could accumulate many small new ways and pile them up to form one large new way."

--"Mon Plaisir"

No one belongs here more than you: stories, Miranda July

"When he needed a piece of wood for some job, he chose it carefully, looked at it as though asking who it was, examined its grain, and looked for suggestions from the wood itself. For me it was a lesson to be taken as a rule of life: never do things by chance, never exaggerate needlessly, as when one gives too much importance to a person, or too much love, or an excessive tip."

Reflections and Shadows, Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi (translated by John Shepley) 

"The idea of reflections came to me in reading an observation by Pascal, cited in a book by W.H. Auden, who wrote an unusual kind of autobiography by collecting the quotations he had annotated in the course of his life, which is a good way of displaying oneself, as a reflection of these quotations."

Reflections and Shadows, Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi (translated by John Shepley)

 "It's impossible to find anything new without first giving something up."

Reflections and Shadows, Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi (translated by John Shepley) 

"It's better to leave certain things in peace, just the way they are in memory: with the passage of time they become the mythology of our lives. I haven't even wanted to see certain people again with whom I had been more or less friendly in terms of time and place: schoolmates, childhood companions. You can't resume a dialogue that never was a real dialogue but rather a temporary complicity, the kind of complicity established among people occupying the same compartment in a train. Of course, if I had to go back and live on Palas Street in Bucharest, where I spent my childhood and youth, yes, I would do it; but to pay the place a hasty visit would seem to me an inadmissible lack of respect."

Reflections and Shadows, Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi (translated by John Shepley)