Quotes from Pico Iyer

Is it any wonder that Canada, so generous when it comes to supporting the arts, is also a world leader when it comes to creating community, fashioning a global vision and nurturing an expansive vision of humanity?

Home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.

One wonders if the time will ever come when men . . . will lie down as gracefully and as ripe.

This road No one on it As autumn ends

Sometimes, the stars come down and walk among us as people.

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.

In the past, I've visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn't ordinarily explore.

Something in us is telling us we're moving too fast, at a pace dictated by machines rather than by anything human, and that unless we take conscious measures, we'll permanently be out of breath.

If I was a parent or a kid, I would need a cell phone, and those things are invaluable, but my kids are out of the house now, and I am thrilled when I wake up to not have a cell phone, and feel like today is stretching out in front of me for 1,000 hours, as it seems.

Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure.

Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.

Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer.

We can't change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world - and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment.

Places have charisma, in short, as much as people do.

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.

The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.

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.

For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.

Movement is a fantastic privilege but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to.

For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.

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.

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.

A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.