“I had always maintained a difficult relationship with phones, a combination of repulsion, squeamishness, and lifelong fear, an irrepressible phobia that I no longer even tried to suppress but had finally come to terms with, handling it by using them as little as possible. I had always known more or less unconsciously that this fear was tied to death — maybe to sex and death — but never, before this night, never had I been given such an uncontestable confirmation that there is absolutely some secret alchemy connecting phones to death.”
– Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Running Away, 2005