Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

Waiting is an exercise of faith that demonstrates the condition of our hearts. Waiting on God is an act of faith. And faith is what separates the men from the boys.

Each meeting occurs at the precise moment for which it was meant. Usually, when it will have the greatest impact on our lives.

We aren’t encouraged to think for ourselves and ask questions. We are expected to accept what they teach us as infallible truths.

... and it broke my heart in so many pieces I wondered if it would ever be whole again.

Fortune, thou hadst no deity, if men Had wisdom.

Its really a luck of the draw or fate or destiny, whatever you want to call it, but you dont know if youre going to resonate with people or not.

The spirit from which we act is the principal matter.

You always have enough to be happy. It's the patterns in your head that make you unhappy.

I knew a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and learned forty percent more about cats than the man who didn't.

Love endures everything, love is stronger than death, love fears nothing.