Its haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

So be patient. Do not compromise. And give your destiny time to find you.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god.

The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.

On paper I would be a rather bold individual in our culture.

If we accept that we are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all cultures share the same genius. And whether that genius is placed into technological wizardry which has been our great achievement, or, by contrast, placed into the unraveling of complex threads of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice.