The undulent landscape looks serene in every direction. Honey-colored farmhouses, gently placed in hollows, rise like thick loaves of bread set out to cool.

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.

People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they're children.

If home isn't a place, what is it?''A feeling.

You said it was a sacrifice. Coming from me, it's a gift.

You would think there's a natural limit to tears: only so much the body can give at one sitting before it runs dry.

I'll stop wearing black when they invent a darker color.

Shy” was the sympathetic interpretation she got from older people. “Snotty” was the interpretation she got from people her own age.

By disregarding intuition in favor of science, or science in favor of instincts, we limit ourselves.

It was great to play for a live audience on a stage.

I wanted to be at my sister's funeral, but my family has always had a complicated dynamic.

I'm just a huge fan of Joe Carnahan. He's such a charismatic individual and somebody that just applies every part of himself to the project he's in.