He [The Dalai Lama] has made it his mission to say, "We can't afford to squabble over minor differences, we have to concentrate on what we have in common, our common mission, our common culture - and indeed what we have in common with the rest of the world."

One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.

We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.

As soon as I began to talk to Dalai Lama, I realized that Chinese and Tibetans from his point of view are mostly the same. And as he pointed out during the recent disturbances, the Chinese are suffering under a tough government much as the Tibetans are.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.