Anytime the perfume of orange and lemon groves wafts in the window; the human body has to feel suffused with a languorous well-being.

Indecision is a virus that can run through an army and destroy its will to win or even to survive.

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.

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.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

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.