“Foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it.”……“But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.”

“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”

“Books educate people and educated people ask awkward questions of those who govern them. The educated, in short, are considered ungovernable. Better to keep people ignorant of the past and to concentrate their minds on the utopia that lies ahead.”

“We can't choose where we come from, but we can choose where we go from there.”

“I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons, and maybe we'll never know most of them, but even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there, we can still do things, and try to feel okay about them.”

“An oft-quoted statistic from the [United Nations] reports is that the amount of literature translated into Spanish in a single year exceeds the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years.”

“At some point you have to choose between life and fiction." The Words”