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I hang onto a word, the one word that Romanians are so proud of because they say it can’t be translated into any other language. The word dor. […] It means something like longing, like a yearning that you can’t explain and you don’t know why you have it. It hits you when you look at certain landscapes and listen to certain music, such as music played on special Romanian instruments whose names are untranslatable, flutes with many tubes and instruments like huge horns. Then you see the mountains where your ancestors lived and fought the Turks and the Huns and the Visigoths, and where they looked at the sky and dreamed the way you look at the sky and dream now. You look at all that, and you become melancholy and you yearn for something. That’s what dor means.

…Love breaks my bones and I laugh.

I’m sorry that I’m both your umbrella and the rain.

Consider this: You can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photo-receptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it.