“Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than race, class, or ethnicity.”

“You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.”

“For there are devils in the deep, but worst are the ones we make.”

“Long before Christopher Columbus, the celebrated Chinese navigator Zheng He travelled through the south and westward maritime routes in the Indian Ocean and established relations with more than thirty countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.”

“Being awake consciously means that you are fully present. And being fully present means you are consciously aware of how present you are.”

“We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspect of ourselves truly, whether it is that we are suckers for romance or pining for adventure or secretly fascinated by crime.”

“love is an action, the practice of a human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as the result of a compulsion. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a ‘standing in,’ not a ‘falling for.”

“You cannot mourn the life you haven't live yet, only one that has already gone. You will never know the meadows you could grow, if you are fixated on the ashes of a garden you never had.”