The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.

...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

Heaven’s Tao is impartial, yet those who follow its compassionate waywill always be nourished

When we get to the end of ourselves, we get to the beginning of God.

If everybody who voted in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election. We will win this election.

You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet could be running loose in your pants.

That's the kind of visual that you're trying to attract - something that in some way or another, connects you to what's happening there in a realistic way.

How sweetly he came to her, she thought. Even with his bulk and power, he came to her...sweetly.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.

Neither team has really taken the baton by the scruff of the neck and put their stamp on it.