If you want to know what's important to a culture, learn their language.
Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.
A man who casts no shadow isn't really a man at all.
Remember, it's the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings.
The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things.