“Where do nations begin? In airport lounges, of course. You see them arriving, soul by soul, in pre-activation mode. They step into no man's land, with only their passports to hold onto, and follow the signs to the departure gate. There, among the impersonal plastic chairs and despite themselves, they coalesce into the murky Rorschach stain of nationhood.”

“I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from, they ask. Does it matter, I answer.But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other place and people, if you don't even know where you come from?”

“At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was handing out box cutters to the passengers.”

“Civilized nations build libraries; lands that have lost their soul close them down.”

“If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.”

“Where else is the gate of life if not in the eyes of your soul?”

“Only themselves understand themselves and the like of themselves,As souls only understand souls.”