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

by Patrick Modiano

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.

What happiness it would be to float through the air and finally know the feeling of weightlessness I had been searching for my whole life.

As it stood, she was doomed to keep taking the same line of the Métro home until the end of her days.

“Neutral zones have at least one advantage: They are only a starting point and we always leave them sooner or later.”

She wanted to escape, to run farther and farther away, to break violently with her everyday life, to finally be able to breathe.