“We were given one country and we've set up in another.”

“We are walking on the foundations of literature, up the steep, stony path in the fiery heat.”

“I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.”

“There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.”

“But the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else, cannot be given to the reader through factual description. And maybe not at all. You have to find your own secret images. The slow fall of a coin into the gorge with the sun catching the copper only for a moment, and the fall into nothing says more about a sense of place than three pages of restaurant and hotel descriptions...”

“Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign. ”

“I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.”