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.

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?

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.

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

One day can change your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is is three or four big days that change everything.

Where there is not the slightest of misery

If a tree falls in the woods when no one is there, does it still make a noise? If a girl dies in the woods when no one is there, does anyone care? If no one knows I am here, do I even exist?

One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice love passion.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

I have such a strong belief in women's ability to sustain each other.

In Fischer's hands, a slight theoretical advantage is as good a being a Queen ahead

We forget to remain focused on the things that really matter.

We are commanded to have only one enemy, the devil. With him never be reconciled! But with a brother, never be at enmity in thy heart.