“The Lazio fans always stop [at the bakery] on their way home from the stadium to stand in the street for hours, leaning up against their motorcycles, talking about the game, looking macho as anything, and eating cream puffs.I love Italy.”

“Luca’s grandfather (whoI hope is known as Nonno Spaghetti) gave him his first sky-blue Lazio jersey when the boywas just a toddler. Luca, likewise, will be a Lazio fan until he dies.“We can change our wives,” he said. “We can change our jobs, our nationalities and evenour religions, but we can never change our team.”By the way, the word for “fan” in Italian is tifoso. Derived from the word for typhus. In otherwords—one who is mightily fevered.”

“In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, 'I've always been a big fan of your work …”

“Then he asked me to tell him some stories about India, about America, about Italy, about my family. That's when I realized that I am not Ketut Liyer's English teacher, nor am I exactly his theological student, but I am the merest and simplest of pleasures for this old medicine man- I am his company. I'm somebody he can talk to because he enjoys hearing about the world and he hasn't had much of a chance to see it.”

“Desperate love is always the toughest way to do it.”

“Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless, newborn baby--I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to--I just don't care.”

“We are not alien visitors to this planet, after all but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we'll all end up when we die, and during the interim, it is our home, And there's no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don't at least marginally understand our home.”