“Listen to me, Amin," I said slowly. "Listen to me very carefully. Nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same again. There lives on this earth a woman who can be my friend and my lover. Do you understand that? Do you understand what a marvelous thing that is?""A friend is a friend," Uthman interrupted, "and a woman is a woman. You can't have them in one person. The whole world knows that.""If that's what the whole world knows, ...then the whole world is wrong. I believed the whole world, and I lost her.”

“Nothing can do what a book can do. Lifts you out of your life... to a whole new world, whole new perspective. A book is like a dream you're borrowing from a friend.”

“You're asking yourself, Can I give this child the best possible upbringing and keep her out of harm's way her whole life long? The answer is no, you can't. But nobody else can either. Not a state home, that's for sure. For heaven's sake, the best they can do is turn their heads while the kids learn to pick locks and snort hootch, and then try to keep them out of jail. Nobody can protect a child from the world. That's why it's the wrong thing to ask, if you're really trying to make a decision."So what's the right thing to ask?"Do I want to try? Do I think it would be interesting, maybe even enjoyable in the long run, to share my life with this kid and give her my best effort and maybe, when all's said and done, end up with a good friend.”

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

“That's the trouble with having the whole world love you. One day, you wake up and it's flirting with your best friend instead. And you don't know what to do. You're thrown.”

“THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.”

“That's a tarantula,' he said. 'You got to watch out for them suckers. They can jump four feet. If they get you, you go crazy. It's a special kind of poison'This I didn't believe. I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we?”