The Global Soul by Pico Iyer

"The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land" --Hugo of St.Victor

"My words have not caught up with me--it is as if they are pieces of luggage that the airline misplaced and sent on a later flight--and it is only slowly, day by day, that I come back into focus, until, at last, perhaps a week after I’ve returned, I wake up one morning and realize that I am reassembled, intact, here."

"Globalism made the world the playground of those with no one to play with"

"It must be an awful thing to live in a country where you have to explain that you really belong there" --Rudyard Kipling

(I have been both too quick and too slow to call someplace home) "A global soul could be a person who had grown up in many cultures all at once--and so lived in the cracks between them--or might be one who, though rooted in background, lived and worked in a globe that propelled him from tropic to snowstorm in three hours...realizing that, as a member of neither culture, I could chose between selves at will, wowing my California friends with the passages of Greek and Latin I'd learned in England, and telling my breathless friends in Oxford how close I lived to the Grateful Dead. With any of my potential homes, in fact, I could claim or deny attachment when I chose; someone like me could select even the most fundamental details of our lives."

"The global soul may see so many sides of every question that he never settles on a firm conviction. He may grow so used to giving back a different self according to his environment that he loses sight of who he is when no one is around. 'Where do you come from' can be more treacherous to answer than 'where do you stand.' The temptation in the face of all this can be to try to lay anchor anywhere, even in a faith one doesn't believe entirely, just so one will have a home and solid ground under one's feet. To lack a center, after all, may be to lack something essential to the state of being human--to be rooted--is perhaps the most important and least recognized needs of the human soul."

"Speaking across a language gap means speaking less to win than to communicate...and living out of a linguistic suitcase , I am reminded of what I find on every foreign trip, which is that, leaving home, I am convinced I don't have all I need; and, within a few days, I feel I have three times more than I require. The extra words (and extra goods) get in the way."

"We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God." --Annie Dillard