Pico Iyer Quotes

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

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

it’s not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them;

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.

It doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

Sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it;

... epiphanies rarely repeat themselves.

None of the things in life - like love or faith - was arrived at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder.

Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.

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

one is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.

What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady. To be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together, and they would not trust or want to listen to one another; but each is a piece of a stained-glass whole without which I couldn’t make sense to myself, or to the world outside.

Perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in LA thinks he knows Cambodia because he's seen The Killing Fields on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows LA because he's seen City of Angels on video.

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.

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. •

One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.

The beauty of any first time is that it leads to a thousand others...

If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. —Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz

Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?

Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply. •

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.

not 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.

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.

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

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

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.

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.

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.

The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it “has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult.” Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real…”the Universe itself is the scripture of Zen." Pico Iyer from introduction.

Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere. Our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we’re sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences. Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art. Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.

Pico Iyer: “And at some point, I thought, well, I’ve been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I’ve spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there’s this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps.

... 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.

A lack of affiliation may mean a lack of accountability, and forming a sense of commitment can be hard without a sense of community. Displacement can encourage the wrong kinds of distance, and if the nationalism we see sparking up around the globe arises from too narrow and fixed a sense of loyalty, the internationalism that's coming to birth may reflect too roaming and undefined a sense of belonging.

Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

As I wandered around the room, with Sachiko by my side, I began to think how much we need space in those we love, space enough to accommodate growth and possibility. Knowledge must leave room for mystery; intimacy, taken too far, was the death of imagination. Keeping some little distance from her was, I thought, a way of keeping an open space, a silence for the imagination to fill. "At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things," Thoreau had written, "we require that all things be mysterious and unexplainable.

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

What if?" points in both directions.

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.

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.

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.

One could start just by taking a few minutes out of every day to sit quietly and do nothing, letting what moves one rise to the surface. One could take a few days out of every season to go on retreat or enjoy a long walk in the wilderness, recalling what lies deeper than the moment or the self. One could even, as Cohen was doing, try to find a life in which stage sets and performances disappear and one is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions. The

...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.

I think about Rilke, who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer I believe it is our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity. Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration. ... I write out of my questions. Hopefully, if we write out of our humanity, our vulnerable nature, then some chord is struck with a reader and we touch on the page. I know that is why I read, to find those parts of myself in a story that I cannot turn away from. The writers who move me are the ones who create beauty and truth out of their sufferings, their yearnings, their discoveries. It is what I call the patience of words born out of the search. ... Perhaps as writers we are really storytellers, finding that golden thread that connects us to the past, present, and future at once. I love language and landscape. For me, writing is the correspondence between these two passions. It is difficult to ever see yourself. I don't know how I've developed or grown as a writer. I hope I am continuing to take risks on the page. I hope I am continuing to ask the hard questions of myself. If we are attentive to the world and to those around us, I believe we will be attentive on the page. Writing is about presence. I want to be fully present wherever I am, alive to the pulse just beneath the skin. I want to dare to speak "the language women speak when there's no one around to correct them".

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sōseki is an unusually intimate writer— the public world is only his concern by implication— and in Japan (again as in the England that I know) intimacy is shown not by all that you can say to someone else, but by all that you don’t need to say.

As I came down from the mountain, I recalled how, not 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. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources—it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one’s senses. I

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.

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.

I worry that travel is becoming more a form of consumerism, whether you live in Santa Monica or Shanghai, than a real exercise in curiosity, and that as the world grows more open and available, going to another country will seem more like going to a cool ethnic supermarket or trendy restaurant than a true journey into shock or difference.

how every character is effectively a tiny figure in a suffocating world of associations and obligations; where many an American novel might send its protagonist out into the world to make his own destiny, in Sōsuke’s Japan he cannot move for all his competing (and unmeetable) responsibilities to his aunt, his younger brother, his wife, and society itself.

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

I’d turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it’s harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world.

But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us.

All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can’t be sure of a thing.

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.

reality is neither an insult nor an aberration, but the partner with whom we have to make our lives

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

Soon after we first got to know each other, I asked him a typical traveler’s question: How did he deal with jet lag? He looked at me, surprised. “For me a flight is just a brief retreat in the sky,” Matthieu said, as if amazed that the idea didn’t strike everyone. “There’s nothing I can do, so it’s really quite liberating. There’s nowhere else I can be. So I just sit and watch the clouds and the blue sky. Everything is still and everything is moving. It’s beautiful.” Clouds and blue sky, of course, are how Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn’t mean a blue sky isn’t always there behind the obscurations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again. His

This reticence has little to do with trying to protect oneself and everything to do with trying to protect others from one’s problems, which shouldn’t be theirs; it’s one reason Japan is so confounding to foreigners, as its people faultlessly sparkle and attend to one another in in public, while often seeming passive and unconvinced of their ability to do anything decisive at home.

If they can’t get to Europe, they’ll find their way to a local theme-park Eiffel Tower. Even a place that we write off as “inauthentic,” they realize, can arouse emotions that are entirely authentic.

And it's only by going nowhere- by sitting still or letting my mind relax- that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

What avails monastic aspirations when, as Mark had said, religious geniuses were born and not made? Could not renouncing the world be a form of self-indulgence? Was not monasticism, in the end, as much an act of cowardice as courage?

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.

Nw a kind of no-man's-land occupied by a neo-Elizabethan hugger-mugger of racketeers, drug dealers, gangsters and abortionists, the shark-toothed area seemed only a rowdier version of the city all around — a freewheeling, free-spending center of free enterprise.

For some reason I have become terribly serious since arriving here,” Sōseki wrote, in his “Letter from London,” a year after his arrival in England. “Looking and listening to everything around me, I think incessantly of the problem of ‘Japan’s future.’” Its future, then as now, involves trying to make a peace, or form a synthesis, between the ancient Chinese ideal of sitting still and watching the seasons pass, tending to social harmonies, and the new American way of pushing forward individually , convinced that tomorrow will be better than today.

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".

Yes, I love that word “absorption” because I think that's my definition of happiness. I think all of us know we are happiest when we forget ourselves, when we forget the time, when we lose ourselves in a beautiful piece of music or a movie or a deep conversation with a friend or an intimate encounter with someone we love. That's our definition of happiness.

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.

You’re not writing a biography?” Mike now asked. “Oh no. The opposite. A counterbiography, as it were. I don’t think you find someone by going to where he lived, least of all someone as shifting and undomesticated as Greene. I’m interested in the things that lived inside him. His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us.

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.

Very few people feel happy racing from one text to the next to the appointment to the cell phone to the emails. If people are happy like that, that's great. I think a lot of us have got caught up in this cycle that we don't know how to stop and isn't sustaining us in the deepest way. And I think we all know our outer lives are only as good as our inner lives. So to neglect our inner lives is really to incapacitate our outer lives. We don't have so much to give to other people or the world or our job or our kids.

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty. In the central literary text of the land, The Tale of Genji, the word for “impermanence” is used more than a thousand times. Beauty, the foremost Jungian in Japan has observed, “is completed only if we accept the fact of death.” 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. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.