In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books Classics)

by Patrick Modiano

Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.

There’s nothing to understand. When we really love someone, we’ve got to accept their role in the mystery.

And then people just vanish one day and you realize you didn’t know the first thing about them, not even who they really were.