Quotes from Pico Iyer

Japanese "indifference to the Mystery of the Universe," my cousin's great-grandfather was wise enough to add, "is that which enables them to give more time and to spend more energy on the solution of the problems nearer at hand." · That same indifference binds them together, because there's no need for individual speculation or debate in a choir; Shinto, lacking arguments, cannot be refuted.

As he turned round and drove away, he saw her standing in the driveway, in her white dress, looking for all the world like a child dropped off against her will after a custody weekend.

Airports say a lot about a place because they are both a city's business card and its handshake; they tell us what a community yearns to be as well as what it really is (much like the people inside them, often, who are dressed up for the occasion, and worn ragged and bare by the experience).

As it is common to hear now, 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.

In sumi-e, he said, as in haiku aur in any Zen training, the aim was to develop a discipline so sure and a spirit so true that one could afford to be atleast spontaneous; to get into such a state of deliberateness that as soon as one put pen to paper, one would produce something powerful and true.

In sumi-e, he said, as in haiku or in any Zen training, the aim was to develop a discipline so sure and a spirit so true that one could afford to be atleast spontaneous; to get into such a state of deliberateness that as soon as one put pen to paper, one would produce something powerful and true.

In sumi-e, he said, as in haiku or in any Zen training, the aim was to develop a discipline so sure and a spirit so true that one could afford to be utterly spontaneous; to get into such a state of deliberateness that as soon as one put pen to paper, one would produce something powerful and true.

You learned about autumn early.

Words have little value in the kingdom of essential things. They're just decorations on the feelings too deep for us to put into syllables.

More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae. What is the virtue of speaking Japanese, Lafcadio Hearn noted, if you cannot think in Japanese?

The symbols mean everything if you accept the feelings that they carry.

Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.

But it speaks for an inner world— and again this is evident in Murakami— that sits in a different dimension from the smooth-running, flawlessly attentive, and all but anonymous machine that keeps public order moving forward so efficiently in Japan.

And the question at the heart of every one was as simple as it was unanswerable: how make peace and passion rhyme?

Hold this moment forever, I tell myself; it may never come again.

Reality seemed so paltry next to castles—dungeons—in the air.

told Louis one sunlit afternoon that the essence of the Dalai Lama's teaching for non-Buddhists was contained in the line we'd read at school, from Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. / The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist.

This road No one on it As autumn ends —BASHO, near Kyoto, weeks before his death

I decided that I would no longer seek out holy places in [a] city of temples. I would just let life come to me in all its happy confusion and find the holiness in that.

Everywhere, in some lights, is a Lonely Place, just as everyone, at moments, is a solitary. Everyone sometimes dances madly when alone, or thumbs through secrets in a drawer. Everyone, at some times, is a continent of one.

Dying is the art we have to master, it seems to say— not death; late love settles into us as spring romances never could.

both characters had given up what they held dearest, the very basis of their lives — their premises — for a woman, and then had found in her a kind of saving grace. They had opened themselves up and, in the opening, found a transformation. In the pretty pun of C. S. Lewis, they had been "surprised by joy.

Nothing sets you (or at least me) free creatively," says the untamed film director and Monty Pythonite, Terry Gilliam, "like having a set of limitations to explore.