“Logically, if you grow up here and you are open minded, you go to college and never come back. If you like it here, which means that you are happy living in the same house, with the same people and ideas as the generation before, then you stay. If you stay, you marry someone just like you. It's like inbreeding.”

“If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?”

“Sometimes you want to stay with someone, not only because it's magic and it's promising and it feels like home; but sometimes you find someone and you want to stay with him (or her)—because you're the same kind of animal.”

“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”

“These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.”

“Let the love grow. Your mistake would be to rush it. Never allowing the seeds you've planted to grow, is all you'll be doing. Everything takes time. Nothing blooms overnight. If you want that man to stay in your life you must be the woman in the relationship. Men if you want that woman to stay, you must be the man in the relationship. Nothing just comes to you. If you want it, you have to try and even sacrifice. No pain, no gain. That's life, whether you accept it or not it's going to always stay the same.”