Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty.

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

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.

When I was two years old, I heard about his [Dalai Lama] flight from Tibet. Being very little, I said, "Oh, good Tibetans, bad Chinese." Those were the black-and-white ways that I thought.

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

I would now put all my heart with the Tibetan people and the Tibetan cause, but not at the expense of the Chinese, and not say that Tibetans are good and Chinese are bad. And in my own life, I hope I would learn to be a little less full of right and wrongs, and a little more able to see everything as a potential right.

Because I don't belong entirely to Britain or the U.S. or India or Japan, I build my foundations in some way deeper than mere passports, and more in the light of where I'm going than of "where I come from."