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Of all the nations I have visited the U.S.A. and Russia suit me best. The people seem more ready to talk to strangers without being formal or disapproving. Is this because, like me, they have very little past?

"Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day, you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love go away. You are born with nothing-no watch, no T-shirt. You work hard, then you die with nothing-no watch, no T-shirt. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old."

It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear."

There was nothing heroic in what I did next, dealing with the baby and my own car and the stalled nose-to-tail traffic that made the three miles to the babysitter’s seem like a trek across the wastelands of the earth—it was just life, that was all

They were stalled at the lights, a single driver in every car, the cars themselves like steel shells they’d extruded to contain their resentments

‘I am a libertine, but I am neither a delinquent nor an assassin.’

the greatest moment of love is separation, loneliness, the melancholy of remembrance

My recollection is that this idea—writers’, musicians’, and other artists’ “late works,” “late style,” “Adorno and lateness,” etc.—became part of Edward’s conversation sometime at the end of the 1980s. He had begun to be interested in this phenomenon and was engrossed in reading about it. He discussed it with many friends and colleagues and began to include examples of late works in many of his articles on music and literature. He even wrote specific essays on the late works of some writers and composers. He also gave a series of lectures on “late style,” first at Columbia and then elsewhere, and in the early 1990s he taught a class on the topic. Finally he decided to write a book and had a contract in hand.