And another book quote…
Once you decide to leave, you view a city through an entirely different lens. The simplest of actions, actions you have repeated one hundred, maybe a thousand, times swell in significance since each time may now be the last: the last time you buy bread at the bakery, the last time you ride on the U-Bahn Line 2, the last time you get your boots fixed at the cobbler, the last time you go to the newsagent’s for a travel pass or a pack of gum. There were so many things I would miss, I realised, even things I hadn’t seen in a while, like the stone-face museum guards from the days when I still went to museums and the scenester kids plowing through the flea markets in search of the holy vintage grail and the stern women from the bank and the post office with their eighties hairdos and the ice-cream place on Stargarder Straße, where there was always a line, even in winter, and that German punctuality, which made you miss your bus by seven seconds but also ensured you arrived at your appointments on time, and of course the voice of the S-Bahn announcer as he rolled off the stations and Alexanderplatz with its ever-changing face and the yellow streetcars, napping or in motion.
Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds
