“Respect yourself and others will come to respect you. That is true about all of us, but especially true about women. That is the meaning of honour.”

“That's the way life takes us,' Elleke once said. 'It takes us like this, then it turns us over and takes us like that.' What she didn't say was that through it all we manage to cling to something that makes sense.”

“Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.”

“I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.”

“Just be true to yourself, and listen as much as one is able to to other people whose opinions you respect and look up to but in the end it has to come from you. You can’t really worry too much by looking to the left and the right about what the competition is doing or what other people in your field are doing. It has to be a true vision.”

“If you care about yourself, you should care about learning - even learning simple things. You come to have pride in yourself only by accomplishing things, even from fixing some old stairs...Others can't grant you self-respect, even others who care about you. You have to earn self-respect yourself.”

“Love is spiritual. It's about self-sacrifice and commitment. And discipline. You cannot have true love without discipline and respect. When you lose the respect of your spouse, you've lost everything.”