“As if the night had said to me, You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.”

“A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a const...”

“It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design tranquility. All things follow their course.”

“It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.”

“What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.”

“If you really want peace in any world you have to learn to say nothing.”

“I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.”

“Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine hav...”

“Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they're more "open to new experiences" than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self t...”

“Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself.”

“Of course, it is boring to read about boring thing, but it is better to read something that makes you yawn with boredom than something that will make you weep uncontrollably, pound your fists again...”

“Dearest creature in creation,Study English pronunciation.I will teach you in my verseSounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.I will keep you, Suzy, busy,Make your head with heat grow dizzy.Tear...”

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages dow...”