A city is nothing more than a machine for generating stories, most of which are (a) redundant and (b) uninteresting.
[...]
Like every other pair of girls who promised friends-forever on that day and never saw one another again, we two – who were never friends, and made no such promises – were surely utter non-entities to each other by the time the diplomas were all handed out.
[...]
Nostalgia, memory, sadness, love, fate, mourning one's lost innocence, the impermanence of all things – have we not a veritable thematic laundry list along which every possible permutation of this conversation has been laundered to gleaming white colourless blandness?