Quotes from Pico Iyer

You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is...frozen.

It's kind of spooky sometimes,' a Canadian lawyer said to me one day. 'There you are, in the Kim Do Hotel, it's ninety-three degrees outside, and it's April eighth, and you're listening to a Vietnamese cover version of Jingle Bells.

Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

The quintessential Japanese balance, I thought: to surrender all of yourself to an illusion, and yet somewhere, in some part of yourself, to know all the while that it is an illusion.

And just as it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love—our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything—so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk.

you could help people most by not giving them the burden of your heart.

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.

Everywhere you turned, everything was happening, and everything that was happening took you away from all abstraction and into something human, where answers weren't so easy.

What if?" points in both directions.

Autumn is the season of subtractions, the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain. At least four times as many classical poems are set in autumn and spring, the seasons of transition, than in summer and winter. But what that means, I realize as the years pass, is that nothing can be taken for granted; people are on alert, wide awake, ready to seize each day as a blessing because the next one can't be counted on.

Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out. · What we see and smell and hear is real, it reminds us; what we think about that is not. · In much the same spirit, the Japanese aesthetic is less about accumulation than subtraction, so that whatever remains is everything.

There's one problem with California." I wasn't eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. "It has no understanding of evil.

How to adjust to a world in which the climax of a scene— and sometimes the central event— is going to sleep? We're going to have to adapt, maybe even invert our sense of priority and our assumptions about what constitutes drama, as most of us foreigners have to do when traveling to Japan.

The ultimate purpose of Zen," I remembered the röshi telling me, "is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.

So much of our lives takes place in our heads - in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation - that sometimes I feel that I can change my life by changing the way I look at it.

Suffering is the central fact of life, from his Buddhist viewpoint; it's what we do with it that defines our lives.

When love is a commodity, you wonder why anyone's giving it away for free. Or what the hidden costs might be.

Families are so important here," I said. She looked surprised. "They are not everywhere?

Marriage she clearly regarded as a businesslike proposition - a matter of domestic deals and daily accounts in which emotions where as irrelevant as love songs in a resume, now, though, as the Heian courtiers had it, and find all the sensations she kept so neatly in her head, of "First love" and "True love" and even "Lost love".

We now have access, increasingly, to more and more cultures across the globe, and the result is that restlesness has gone global, and hopdfulness, and the sense of an answer being found somewhere else.

Irreverence, independent-mindedness and a hunger for far-off cultures have defined it {San Francisco} ever since people began streaming into the area in 1849 in search of new fortunes from gold, and a settlement of 812 souls became within two years a city of almost 25,000, many from China, Korea and Australia, clustered around more than 1,000 gambling houses.

When he gives lectures in the West, I heard the Dalai Lama say in Japan, the audience tunes out the minute he starts speaking about ritual and comes to life as soon as he speaks about philosophy; in Japan, the formula is reversed.

Even as we fret about the changes our progress wreaks in the air and on the airwaves, in forests and on streets, we hardly worry about the change it is working in ourselves, the new kind of soul that is being born out of a new kind of life. Yet this could be the most dangerous development of all, and the least examined. " -Pico Iyer

To Marcel Duchamp's blithe "There is no solution, because there is no problem," the Japanese visual artist Shigeko Kubota replied, "There is no problem, because there is no solution.