Until the Nineteen-Eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China's first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often house...
Two days after the Boston marathon bombings, there was a drone strike in Yemen attacking a peaceful village, which killed a target who could very easily have been apprehended. But, of course, it is just easier to terrorise people. The drones are a te...
I really like Berlin! When I went there, it felt like a big city and a village all at the same time. I didn't really understand the place to begin with, but I was very curious, and I came home and told everyone that I'd be moving there. It was a leap...
So often at home in the West Village, I'm like, 'Why aren't I allowed a horse?' I would keep a horse in a stable in my apartment, and I would fit him with rubber shoes, and we'd just roll him out. If I needed to go to a meeting somewhere, I'd just ge...
I walked across Tuscany from Siena to Rome, which was a lovely way to see the landscape. It was sunny but not too hot, and we made detours to look at treasures - churches, paintings, little hill villages. The first couple of days, you feel your knees...
In 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, 'I'd like to live and work in a village.' Mother went i...
I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they nee...
The computer is my favourite invention. I feel lucky to be part of the global village. I don't mean to brag, but I'm so fast with technology. People think it all seems too much, but we'll get used to it. I'm sure it all seemed too much when we were l...
I'm terribly taken by the countryside, so I love things like shadows cast by deep woods. I love the autumn. I love Soho. I love villages or crowded corners of Edinburgh. I love markets, stalls, jumble, jumbly people. Not frightening people, not horri...
I did not have a mobile phone in 1993. No one did, except the occasional banker or Hollywood star seeming smart, or the main character in 'American Psycho.' In 1993, every day was 'let's get lost.' I could walk Greenwich Village for hours and not be ...
We keep imagining eternity as an idea that cannot be grasped, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, imagine suddenly that there will be one little room there, something like a village bathhouse, covered with soot, with s...
Like so many poor Ilokanos, my grandparents left their village, for it could no longer sustain them. The Ilocos is a narrow coastal plain where, so often, the mountain drops to the sea. Land hunger had always afflicted the Ilokanos and made them migr...
Monica Besra, a Bengali woman from a remote Indian village, was reportedly suffering from a malignant ovarian tumor when she went, in 1998, to a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Nuns at the mission reportedly placed a medal...
I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains - Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur's Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father's sp...
I have asked the village blacksmith to forge golden chains to tie our ankles together. I have gathered all the gay ribbons in the world to wind around and around and around and around and around and around again around our two waists.
Mothers really were not built to raise babies not only by themselves, but with only a partner. For millions of years, a woman had much more than just her husband to help rear her young... This whole idea of 'it takes a village to raise a child' is ex...
[last lines] Tatiana's Voice: My name is Tatiana. My father died in the mines in my village, so he was already buried when he died. We were all buried there. Buried under the soil of Russia. That is why I left, to find a better life.
[Stoick fights off a dragon, saving Hiccup] Hiccup: [v.o] Oh, and there's one more thing you need to know. [Stoick faces Hiccup, who is behind a pole. Pole falls into the village, setting it on fire] Hiccup: Sorry... Dad.
[During the interrogation of a village chief after the platoon finds hidden weapons] Pvt. Gator Lerner: Says they had no choice. Says the NVA killed the old honcho when he said no. Now he says all the rice is theirs. Sgt. Barnes: Oh, bullshit, Lerner...
Veer Pratap Singh: After having 8-10 children, you come back to India and I'll carry you around the village on my bicycle. Zaara Hayaat Khan: I'd be too fat by then to be carried on a cycle. Veer Pratap Singh: I'll get you a tractor...
The most beautiful thing that I learned, I learned from my kids. They were eight and ten - and they were playing with Moroccan kids in these humble villages, and they were playing with the Japanese kids... because they haven't built those walls that ...
