Words matter. These are the best Pico Iyer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We readily go to the health club when our doctor suggests we need more exercise, but we regularly neglect the ‘mental health club’ that our well-being more truly requires.
It’s an old principle, as old as the Buddha or Marcus Aurelius: We need at times to step away from our lives in order to put them in perspective. Especially if we wish to be productive.
In barely one generation, we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them – often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.
For centuries, Cuba’s greatest resource has been its people.
Hello Kitty will never speak.
It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that’s necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut.
My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.
Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did, either.
In Japan, I live in a little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I don’t have a bicycle or a car or anything, so my only movement is within the boundaries of my feet. I feel there’s a need for that kind of conscientious objection to the momentum of the world.
Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think… All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world.
In Vancouver, in Sydney and in Orange County, we live among fluorescent stores and streets so brightly lit that you can read a book after dark; in other places across our global body, there are blackouts and curfews every night.
Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep, but the place where you stand.
More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.
I think of myself as living so much outside borders or old categories that I choose as my leaders U2, the Dalai Lama, Vaclav Havel, Sigur Ros, Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, and the girl next door. By definition, in short, my leaders are the ones who think in terms larger, and more intimate, than any country.
You need to rebel to see the other options and to get a much richer, fuller sense of the world. And it’s only once you’ve worked through that and seen through that that you can come back and accept who you are. You have to try all the other options.
Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can’t get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.
I’m very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can’t think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not.
I think it’s in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you.
Japan functions on the basis of everyone sharing certain assumptions, where each person knows his part in a larger whole. The foreigner sits outside and is threatening. If he comes in, that’s the most threatening of all.
The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with.
The less you struggle with a problem, the more it’s likely to solve itself. The less time you spend frantically running around, the more productive you are likely to be.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.
The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
Abjure all accretions and turn off the lights. Put on some music – Leonard Cohen, say, perhaps his ‘Various Positions’ – and let your mind cool down. Soon you’ll forget there’s a word called ‘stress.’
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I’ve been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.
Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It’s how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it – by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I’m sure I’d never do otherwise.
The first time I stepped onto the rooftop of the Potala Palace in Lhasa in 1985, I felt, as never before or since, as if I was stepping onto the rooftop of my being: onto some dimension of consciousness that I’d never visited before.
A book doesn’t have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.
‘Globalization’ has become the great tag phrase, but when we talk about it, it’s nearly always in terms of the global marketplace or communications technology – either data or goods that are whizzing around. We forget that people are whizzing around more and more. On them, it takes a toll.
I’ve never meditated in my life. I don’t practice yoga nor any religion. I’m a tourist on the realm of stillness.
I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy,’ D.H. Lawrence’s novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.
There are literally Internet rescue camps in China and Korea to deal with children that are addicted. Internet disorder is maybe going to count as a psychiatric disorder in a couple of years.
I think at this point I only write books about questions I really want to figure out. They’re indulgences, essentially. I think, ‘What would I like to spend five years really thinking about? What could I gain from thinking about for five years?’
A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.
All of us are feeling scattered and distracted as we try to keep up with an accelerating world. But nearly all of us have an answer in our hands, in simply choosing to do nothing and go nowhere for a while.
I suppose even when I was growing up, I noticed I was most happy when I was absorbed in something, lost in the moment and forgot the time, whether was conversation, movie, or a game I was playing. That was my definition of happiness. And I was least happy when I was all over the place, distracted and restless.
A single Dallas Cowboys football game uses up as much electricity as the entire nation of Liberia in those same three hours – one reason the globe, if looked at from a certain height, is a cluster of lights surrounded by enormous patches of dark.
To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish.
To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath.
I couldn’t follow the events of September 11 because I was proofreading a novel I’d just completed – on Islam and its quarrel with the West – that I’d promised, six months earlier, to deliver to my editor on September 12, 2001.
A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.
Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it’s almost a journey into faith and doubt at once.
