Michael Paterniti

“Ring Kuot, a 15-year-old Sudanese boy, was rumored to be eight feet three. And until Leonid's emergence at eight feet four inches last spring, people generally assumed that Radhouane Charbib of Tunisia, at seven feet nine, was the tallest documented man in the world.”

“The telling room is, in Spanish, known as 'el contador.'”

“Storytelling is about patience, about making sense of the moments of pathos and beauty that you find, and about carrying these moments back into your own life.”

“Though Mohyeldin's journalistic reputation continues to grow - born in Egypt, raised in Michigan, started as a gofer for NBC News, reared as a producer at CNN, first appeared on-camera for Al Jazeera in 2006 - his is hardly a household name, not in America at least.”

“I'd read about Alexander Imich, a Polish-born 'psychic researcher,' in 'The New York Times' not long after he'd turned 111 and had been declared the oldest man on earth.”

“At first, you fall in love. You wake in the morning woozy and your twilight is lit with astral violet light. You spelunk down into each other until you come to possess some inner vision of each other that becomes one thing. Us. Together. And time passes. Like the forming of Earth itself, volcanoes rise and spew lava. Oceans appear. Rock plates shift. Sea turtles swim half the ocean to lay eggs on the mother island; songbirds migrate over continents for berries from a tree. You evolve--cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day. Until love gathers the turtles and the birds of your world and encompasses them, too.”

“I've been told there's a special golden shelf, in the secret vault kept at the back of every bookstore in America, that contains the Bible, 'War and Peace,' and 'Driving Mr. Albert.'”

“What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewards and feeding the hungry, of bringing a rational and utilitarian nation-state into being.”

“Drake's home is its own fantasia, a single-level ranch that sprawls in various wings over 7,500 square feet, from the game room to the gym to Drake's master bedroom with Jacuzzi. The pool is like a scene out of Waterworld, with a bar inside a grotto, waterfalls, and a slide that drops thirty feet through the rock.”

“People have become so much more obsessed with the stories behind their food. When we go the market to buy bacon, we want to know where that pig came from and what processes were involved in getting it to us.”

“Roja Dove - who, at 58, is a stock-straight six feet and handsome with lantern jaw, blue eyes, and impeccably combed silvering hair on the sides of an otherwise tanned bald head - may possess the finest nose in the world.”

“Only occasionally can you glimpse through the embrasures of an otherwise perfectly polite person to see the cannons aimed out, only in a certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins.”

“In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative--there always was--but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?”

“In the battle of substance over flash, few to none of the Al Jazeera correspondents are recognizable to U.S. audiences. Many have foreign names and accents; none have best-selling books atop the list or can be heard pounding their shoes on the nightly infotainment podium.”

“Operating from 1975 to 1979, S-21 became the most infamous of 196 such prison camps the Khmer Rouge established throughout Cambodia, primarily because so many of its prisoners were the purged party loyal - and because Duch's methods were so stunningly brutal.”

“The older we get, the more we desire to reclaim our body at 25; we'll take our face at 35, the elasticity of our mind at its most powerful, to return ourselves somehow to our most vital moment of rigor and protean creation.”

“Being a Barca fan means certain God-given inalienable rights: It means that, no matter what its record, Barca is, and will always be, the greatest team on earth. This is a fact. And it means that your love for Barca is like no other love in the world. It's the kind of love that clouds your memory and gives you hope.”

“Writers like John T. Edge, whose work is all about the cultural histories behind food, have done so much to show that these stories are a really vital part of our cultural heritage.”

“Being partly Italian or, rather, having an Italian last name, I've always dreamed of really becoming partly Italian, of eating piles of mouthwatering fettuccine in the piazza, speaking a language that demands music over mumble, and yes, if I'm honest, perhaps dressing a little better.”

“I do think that narrative, long-form nonfiction is the perfect form because it's rooted in something very real, but we're also, you know, completely spiritual, emotional creatures driven by all sorts of desires and needs.”