moreA

BOOK ONE ~ THE RAGES OF INNOCENCE

“Travelers are privileged to do the most improper things.” Isabelle Bird

BOOK TWO ~ HAND TO MOUTH

“Women are divinities. They are life.” Buddha

BOOK THREE ~ WE LEARN FROM HERSTORY

“Politeness can be a trap, and [she] was caught in the web of [his]courtesy. “As you wish,” she wrote back and what made her write this was not entirely guilt, but also something untranslatable, a law which obliged her to pretend that [his] words meant no more than they said. This law is called takallouf. To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words. Takallouf is a member of that opaque, world wide set of concepts which refuse to travel across linguistic frontiers: it refers to a form of tongue-tying formality, a social restraint so extreme as to make it impossible for the victim to express what he or she really means, a species of compulsory irony which insists, for the sake of good form, on being taken literally.” Salman Rushdie

BOOK FOUR ~ HEARTLAND

“There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very unwholesome and comfortable doctrine and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.” Henry Fielding

BOOK FIVE ~ WHAT IF EVERYTHING'S PERFECT?

“Truly, Cupid makes heroes of us all.” P.G. Wodehouse