When you live in Paris for more than a couple of years, you see a lot of people come, and you see a lot of them go. It’s a great city to visit for a week, or even a few months, traipsing from museum to café to pastry shop, tearing into baguettes, and capping off the day with steak frites in a bistro with a remarkably decent pitcher of vin rouge mai

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

You try to feel like a native, not a foreigner; you progress from grammar to idioms in an attempt to talk as if you belonged. Still, you never succeed in feeling at home. You remain a visitor, perhaps only a tourist. There was always something else, something more, another even larger adjustment to be made.