Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.