From the beginning, I've stressed that home is something internal, invisible, portable, especially for those of us with roots in many physical places; we have to root ourselves in our passions, our values and our deepest friends. My home, I've always felt, lies in the songs and novels that I love, in the wife and mother that I'm never far away from, in the monastery to which I've been returning for 25 years.

The Dalai Lama says Tibet and the modern world can engage in a conversation; perhaps Tibet has something to share with the rest of us based on its researches into mind, and we have a lot that we can share with Tibet.

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.

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

Travel is an act of humility

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.

In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.