there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.

Amid a multitude of projects, no plan is devised.

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.

Drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested.

He had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms.

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.

Here is a hall without exit, a tunnel without end.

Well, no plan survives contact with reality and today is no exception.

How the city attracts all types and how the unwary must suffer from ignorance of its ways.

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.