“I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.”

“For the past several years, I have gone to sleep every night in this same little pocket, the most uneventful piece of time I could find. Same exact thing every night, night after night. Total silence. Absolutely nothing. That's why I chose it. I know for a fact nothing bad can happen to me in here.”

“Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe. ”

“All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action. Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood. Nothing shall be legitimate to a Muslim which belongs to a fellow Muslim unless it was given freely and willingly. Do not, therefore, do injustice to yourselves.”

“Every thought I have is colored by what I learned by what I learned from reading Ray Bradbury.”

“I watch him sleep because the tenderness I have for him is what I have left of everything I started with.My brother was like him, frail blond curls framing a guileless face, he slept the same way, back where I started. A tenderness remembered tangentially, revived when I see this pale, yellow-haired man asleep, at rest, defenseless, incomprehensibly trusting death not to come. We are innocence together, before life set in.Sometimes I feel the tenderness for this man now, the real one asleep, not the memory of the baby brother - sometimes I feel the tenderness so acutely - it balances on just a sliver of memory - I feel it so acutely, it is so much closer to pain than to pleasure or any other thing, for instance, in one second when each knows what the other will say or without a thought our fingers just barely touch, I remember then in a sharp sliver of penetration my baby brother, pale, yellow-haired, curls framing a sleeping face while I lay awake during the long nights, one after the other, while mother lay dying. It is consumingly physical, not to sleep, to be awake, watching a blond boy sleeping and waiting for your mother to die.”