“Laura, this isn't love. Love lets you go on a trip without following you. Love can live without you for a week, knowing you'll come back.''No, it can't.' The afternoon shadows grew long and cold. I...”

“Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.”

“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”

“We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”

“My love for languages and my love for travel really go hand in hand and feed off of each other. Theres no better way to learn a language than by immersing yourself in a culture where its spoken, an...”

“With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.”

“Learning a new language, just like opening a new window, allows you to see the world with intimacy.”

“Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.”

“In nothing is the difference between the Americans and the Soviets so marked as in the attitude, not only toward writers, but of writers toward their system. For in the Soviet Union the writer's jo...”

“Old stories sometimes slid out of her like lamp oil or light, stories containing details oblique and nearly incomprehensible to me or to anyone who has never known that world.”