I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.

As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.

Its no coincidence that the word holiday suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.

For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.

One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.