As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

A leader’s cross is the temporal pain they go through and his crown is the permanent gain when at last victory is achieved.

A day without love and gratitude is a day without significance and wasted.

Barrons: "He got upset it wouldn't shut up and tore its head off."Mac: "The child?" I gasped

I conceived at least one great love in my life, of which I was always the object.

If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

The most he would do was to promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against it. It is about all that, looking back on the history of the Church, one can feel that they have not done.

Using clichés is a substitute for thinking

I love acting, but it's much more fun taking the kids to the zoo.

It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.

It can't be dead. It was alive just a minute ago.