“But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.”

“I think of all those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell.”

“Always, I liked the infinitive 'to go.' Let's go, let's go. let's really go. 'Andare' was the first verb I learned to conjugate in Italian. 'Andiamo,' let's go, teh sound comes out at a gallop.”

“It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.”

“Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.”

“Fiancé. Americans had simply adopted a pronunciation from the French to sugarcoat the sticky implication of the word: Constrained. Bound. Trapped.”