Charles: Don’t you love to think about things at McDonald’s? Paris is a movable feast, just like the double cheeseburger.
relationship coach
Two friends, on traffic lights.
Arnaud: You are a traffic light. If there were more traffic lights like you, road safety would dramatically increase. Cars would come to a standstill!
Cecily: If traffic lights sashayed around the streets with a complete disregard for cars, we’d all think we were living in Rome.
Two friends, on a poetic life.
Cecily: Foster is a young man I met at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. He was such a gentle soul, and an inspiring one. I didn’t think to ask his last name, and he doesn’t know mine. When we parted it felt romantic not to swap details, but now I feel a sense of loss. The only way I could think to contact him again was to leave a note on the literary board in Shakespeare and Company, where he goes all the time to read and to hide his photographs in the pages of their books as a kind of art quest for the public.
Charles: Oh God. Do you ever do things that aren’t poetic?
Two Italians, on a natural woman.
Nicolas: She does not look natural!
Carlo: Sometimes it is good to have women who are natural, sometimes it is better to have women who ignore the whole concept.
Two Italians, on harems.
Carlo: Nicolas, you should have a harem of men like Cecily.
Nicolas: No. I have one woman per night and then she leaves.
Carlo: But really, that’s a kind of harem.
Nicolas: It’s not! I don’t ever intend to keep my women.
Two friends, on escalators.
Charles: There is something very soothing about this escalator.
Cecily: At the end of a tough day, do you go up and down it and feel like you’re in a narrow, metallic womb? And is Freud’s escalator anything like Schrödinger’s box?
Charles: Well it’s certainly a space where there is only one logical direction and no choice. I think you’d quite benefit from Freud-Shrödinger’s escalator.
Two friends, on shirking identity.
Charles: I do not want to be Charles anymore.
Cecily: Charles has light and shade. Sometimes he’s so dryly drôle, at other times wracked with deep malaise, at other times, he simply makes dad jokes. You’re a universe. Don’t deny the world your universe. What does it matter if being Charles hurts you a little? You don’t keep long-term friendships anyway.
Delilah, after Cecily’s birthday.
Delilah: You’re not as destructive as you think you are. You still have wild delusions about your own power. That’s the narcissism of youth. Guess you’re not as old as you thought you were.
Carlo, to Cecily, after returning from Italy.
Carlo: Without you I become a bourgeois.
Two friends, on being sober.
Arnaud: You are sober?
Cecily: Yes.
Arnaud: And the world is still colourful?
Cecily: Very much so.
Arnaud: Was it an accident, your sobriety?
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