The Days Of Our Lives Vanish Utterly,

I Can Remember The Lush Spring Excitement Of Language In Childhood. Sitting In Church, Rolling It Around My Mouth Like Marbles--tabernacle And Pharisee And Parable, Tresspass And Babylon And Covenant.

Born In Jerusalem, Wadie Said Went From Being A Dragoman To A Salesman In The United States And Thence To A Hugely Successful Businessman In Egypt.

It Seems To Me That Anyone Whose Library Consists Of A Kindle Lying On A Table Is Some Sort Of Bloodless Nerd.

We Open Our Mouths And Out Flow Words Whose Ancestries We Do Not Even Know. We Are Walking Lexicons. In A Single Sentence Of Idle Chatter We Preserve Latin, Anglo-saxon, Norse: We Carry A Museum Inside Our Heads, Each Day We Commemorate Peoples Of Whom We Have Never Heard.

I Didn't Want It To Be A Book That Made Pronouncements.