Do you understand the sadness of geography?

Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn't speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, 'Faya!' That was a good day.

Do not allow yourself to be obsessed on failures

You have to do some thinking and know who you are, and then you have to resist compromising your truth for the comfort of others.

The man who grasps an opportunity as it is paraded before him, nine times out of ten makes a success, but the man who makes his own opportunities is, barring an accident, a sure-fire success

Weakness never got anyone anywhere.

He who leaps for the sky may fall, it's true. But he may also fly.

When our minds are filled with light, there is no room for darkness

We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do - some things - appointments, and people's birthdays, and letters to post, and all that - but not an absolutely bally insult like the above.

I was always the shame of the family - the one Yankee who was actually born in the North.

Think as I think," said a man, "or you are abominably wicked; you are a toad." And after I thought of it, I said, "I will, then, be a toad.