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“Ever since, the Paris wherein I have tried to retrace her steps has remained as silent and deserted as it was on that day. I walk through empty streets. For me, they are always empty, even at dusk, during the rush hour, when the crowds are hurrying towards the mouths of the métro. I think of her in spite of myself, sensing an echo of her presence in this neighborhood or that.”
― Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder

“All that energy and activity wasted to find somebody who had in reality been dead for so long, for whom the time of the present was little more than a process of slow physical dissolution, and of the mindless lack of identity of the missing person so long called by name, the very appearance of life itself, of time in the present is stripped away. We feel in its place the presence of graves beneath the bright sunlight; the present fades to little more than a dusty, once-lived moment which will quickly take its place in the back years of an old newspaper file.”
― Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality

“Baby one night somebody
Going to strike a match on a tombstone
And read your name.”
― Frank Stanford, Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives

“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”
― Patrick Modiano