“Cuban eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface.”

“With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfillin...”

“'What comes next?' is the constant question I'm asked by outsiders eager to travel to the island. During the eleven years I traveled to Havana, very few Cubans I met on the island ever bothered to ...”

“Both for Havana's beauty and decay, it's very hard to restrain yourself from staring everywhere you look.”

“Las Vegas, the most expensive toilet in the world that still cant flush.”

“In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city's state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude...”

“I'd become an uncertain creature in her mind, and I found I liked it; she couldn't fathom what else I might be doing when her eyes weren't on me.”

“No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.”

“I could not tell anymore how much of the screaming came from my own mouth. I was borne up on the swell of it, I was the sound. We were all howling together, the poor and the quality, the boxing gir...”

“In politics, the pen is at its heaviest because it is weighed down by the collective responsibility it holds towards its people and their future in the eyes of the world.”

“Pender laughed. "Verify? In this day and age? Who cares about verifying anything? It's all about the speed. Who gets there first defines the truth. You know that as well as any man living.”

“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”

“He couldn't stop staring at her cleavage...The vee in between beckoned him like a bee to nectar.”

“The moment this is over, you're mine," Diesel all but groaned, keeping his eyes on the road so he wouldn't pull over and take her right there."No, wolf, you're mine."the look on his face went immed...”

“Diesel" - his name sounded sweet coming out of her mouth --"I want you, and I mean I really, really want you. Please. Let's go back to my room.”