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.

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.

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

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.

Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.

Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life

She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one’s own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there

...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.

Love is like jumping out of an airplane with no parachute. But there’s no need to be frightened, because that plane is still on the ground.

Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance.