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

by Patrick Modiano

When I look up “bohemian” in the dictionary, I find: A person who leads a wandering life, without rules or worries about the next day.

For me, the Condé was a refuge from all the drabness I anticipated in life. There will one day be a part of me—the best part—that I will be forced to leave behind there.

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.