“It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot.”

“Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish.""Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish.”

“No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.”

“Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.”

“Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.”

“i'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.”

“Nevertheless, while I may not have completely understood what Holy Communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism. Eating the flesh of another human being, I understood, might not always be a really, really bad thing to do. If you were a good Catholic, you had some every Sunday.”