"The literature I love most is the literature of exile of ruins and the experience of exodus. I don’t know why but, for example, the Book of Exodus is very important to me—the wandering of the children of Israel has profound resonance for me. I don’t feel as if those stories are about a primitive tribe in some distant desert. That struggle for belief and faith in the face of humiliation, annihilation, apostasy—all that seems to me really what I go through and what we all go through, finally."

—Li-Young Lee, from the interview “A Well of Dark Waters” in Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee.