Quotes from Pico Iyer

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

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.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.

If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards.

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.

You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly, that you'll never really make it back into the light.

Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.

When you're hurrying around too quickly," he had said, "there's a part of the world you can't see. If, for example, you're taking a wrong direction in your life, it's only when you stop and look at things clearly that you can revise your direction and take a more proper course. Then message of Zen is that in order to find ourselves, we've got to learn to stop.

If you grow up between cultures, if you get accustomed to traveling, it's easy to find yourself always on the outside of things, looking in. This can be ideal for a writer—or a spy; you've always got, analytically, a ticket out.

As Henry David Thoreau, one of the great explorers of his time, reminded himself in his journal, "It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are." Two

Anyone reading this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes—which means we're never caught up with our lives.

She liked it? 'I love it--the way you'd love an orphan, or a bird with a broken foot.

a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.

Home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere, and not the things that tie you down.

greatest surprises I have encountered has been that the people who seem wisest about the necessity of placing limits on the newest technologies are, often, precisely the ones who helped develop those technologies, which have bulldozed over so many of the limits of old. The very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you." Or, as Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek—and in many other places—has it, "I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.

many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it's often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize.

The mother of Jesus, I sometimes remember, was visited by an angel and is seen as a saint; the mother of the Buddha died at his birth. Is it any surprise that Buddhism is about learning to live with loss, while Christianity is about salvation from above?

The Sufis, like all mystics, are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home.

Now I see it's in the spaces where nothing is happening that one has to make a life.

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it is a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.