Mystery: Everything felt better before you got there than when you actually got there. When you actually got there, you didn't quite have the energy to be there.

We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.

This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

My father was very disappointed by war and fighting. And he thought language could help us out of cycles of revenge and animosity. And so, as a journalist, he always found himself asking lots of questions and trying to gather information. He was always very clear to underscore the fact that Jewish people and Arab people were brother and sister.