“The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people’s gestures and movements.”

“There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.”

“I was furious. And furious, I had begun to learn, was different than angry. Angry stays in one place, clawing at your gut and only your gut, or your heart and only your heart. Fury is full-bodied, a clamor of heat. I’d become a devouring furnace, shoveling myself into myself until my rage turned incandescent in the flame.”

“The earliest gardens were walled not to keep out animals, but to keep them in, so they could not be hunted by strangers. The Persian word for these walled sanctuaries was pairidaeza, the Hebrew, pardes, in Greek, paradeiosos. […] The origin of the word ‘paradise’ is simply ‘enclosure.’”