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" I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling. But there's something about it that you can't turn away from. "

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" The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology. "

" We can't change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world - and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment. "

Change The World

" It takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail, researchers have found, and yet the average person receives such an interruption every 11 minutes. Which means that we're never caught up; we're always out of breath, running behind. "

" For centuries, Cuba's greatest resource has been its people. "

" What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson. "

" Something in us is telling us we're moving too fast, at a pace dictated by machines rather than by anything human, and that unless we take conscious measures, we'll permanently be out of breath. "

" For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, 'Where's your home?' I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be. "

" One of the happier ironies of recent history is that even as Tibet is being wiped off the map in Tibet itself, here it is in California, in Switzerland, in Japan. All over the world, Tibetan Buddhism is now part of the neighborhood. In 1968, there were two Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West. By 2000, there were 40 in New York alone. "

" I think it's in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you. "

" The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. "

" A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about. "

" The first time I stepped onto the rooftop of the Potala Palace in Lhasa in 1985, I felt, as never before or since, as if I was stepping onto the rooftop of my being: onto some dimension of consciousness that I'd never visited before. "

" My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible. "

" To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish. "

" There are literally Internet rescue camps in China and Korea to deal with children that are addicted. Internet disorder is maybe going to count as a psychiatric disorder in a couple of years. "

" Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself. "

" Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. "

" I've yet to use a cellphone, and I've never tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event. "

" It's no coincidence that the word 'holiday' suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat. "

" Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise. "

" People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects. "

" I suppose even when I was growing up, I noticed I was most happy when I was absorbed in something, lost in the moment and forgot the time, whether was conversation, movie, or a game I was playing. That was my definition of happiness. And I was least happy when I was all over the place, distracted and restless. "

" The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with. "

" Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep, but the place where you stand. "

" Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night. "

" In Japan, I live in a little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I don't have a bicycle or a car or anything, so my only movement is within the boundaries of my feet. I feel there's a need for that kind of conscientious objection to the momentum of the world. "

" You need to rebel to see the other options and to get a much richer, fuller sense of the world. And it's only once you've worked through that and seen through that that you can come back and accept who you are. You have to try all the other options. "

" In barely one generation, we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. "

" If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals. "

" A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever. "