Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.

Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.

We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.

It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.

The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.

Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.