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.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

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.

I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.

I know more now than I did in the past about the process of democratization. I know more about the pitfalls.

I think I have more patience now than I did in the past.