“ Why , instead of teaching her poetry and drama and needlework, had her governesses not taught the most important lesson anyone could learn - that life was really not going to be easy after one was free of the schoolroom?”

“That day Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I've ever learned in my life. We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We're the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills...Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.”

“A master can teach many things. But the most important lesson for a ninja is to learn oneself.”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

“But she was half in love with chaos... With all her yearning for the ordinary life, she was born to admire outsiders. You could see she felt enlarged by drama and trouble, by the electric pulse of things going wrong, and her vision of the easy life remained in most ways a recurring dream.”

“My father taught me the most important thing about wisdom—that I was going to have to acquire it from other people. So without teaching me, he taught me how to learn from others.”