A Preface of Sorts

"Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost."--Henry James

"Work is love made visible."--Quaker saying

"Love calls us to the things of this world."--Richard Wilbur

"Ever to be bored is to have no/Inner Resources."--John Berryman, Dream Songs

"We live not on things but on the meaning of things."--George Santayana

"May your rice bowl always be full."--Chinese saying

"Don't tell me how educated you are. Tell me how much you traveled."--Mohammed

"I asked him for water/He gave me gasoline."--Lucinda Williams

"She turned me into a newt."
"I got better."--John Cleese, Monty Python and The Holy Grail

"You have to be Zen about this place."--Alex Wood

"Your mouth is your map."--Vietnamese saying

"Where are we going?" I asked.
The answer: "We are going many wheres."

"Yesno."--Doorman, Galaxy Hotel, Hanoi

"The journey is everything."--Virginia Woolf, Common Reader

"Wherever you go, there you are."--Confucius

"Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
In this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
In our bodies, we are determined to see the sun the other way around?...
Is it a lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Ot could Pascal have been not entirely right about sitting quietly in one's room?"--Elizabeth Bishop

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."--Mark Twain

"Finally," I said, "tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her to do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better off to understand why she loves the familiar, and gives a fresh sense  of how fortunate we are to share these things.''--Barry Lopez

"Been away too long/Been here too short."--Grateful Dead

"I know I have had a good day when I have been able to spend it with interesting people, and today was a very good day."--Tom C., U.S. Embassy, Hanoi

"It's not often that you find someone who is a good friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."--E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for if the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."--George Eliot, Middlemarch

"You are the brightest woman I have ever met."--Anonymous

"So good, so far."--Ms. Khanh

Copyright Sandra A. Engel