Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love because suddenly, all your senses are at the setting marked 'on.' Suddenly, you're alert to the secret patterns of the world.

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

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.

As soon as I’m on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life,” Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, “is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.” Or, as Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek – and in many other places – has it, “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.

All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can’t be sure of a thing.

The mother of Jesus, I sometimes remember, was visited by an angel and is seen as a saint; the mother of the Buddha died at his birth. Is it any surprise that Buddhism is about learning to live with loss, while Christianity is about salvation from above?

If you grow up between cultures, if you get accustomed to traveling, it’s easy to find yourself always on the outside of things, looking in. This can be ideal for a writer – or a spy; you’ve always got, analytically, a ticket out.

But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us.

The Sufis, like all mystics, are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home.