Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner.

The Irish have a flair for wringing from death the last drop of emotion and they do not quite understand those who react otherwise.

the sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.

apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.

Sunnis consider Shias a pack of unwholesome fanatics and Shias consider Sunnis a gang of lukewarm no-goods - there's nothing like religion for spreading brotherly love!

[On Addis Ababa:] Among the city's handicaps are an immaturity for which no one can be blamed, as it was founded only eighty years ago, and a proliferation of architectural excesses for which many people can and should be blamed.

poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs.