Airports are distillations of the world. I like thinking of them that way. The hope of leaving and the desire to come home."

We are all connoisseurs of exile, then; we have each, individually, forged our own. To leave at any price and, for various reasons, to go far away from our roots, to make for ourselves other love, other beliefs, and then return to the desert, to those places that have never heard declarations of love."

"Returning was supposed to be a great celebration, seeing others again and displaying her pride at having crossed the sea....without ever mentioning the miseries, the uncertainties, the coldness, the infinite solitude of those foreign landscapes."

The solitude of this book and immigrant experience/feelings, warms my heart