Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams. "
Pico Iyer
Hearts
Only
America
Related Quotes:
" What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson. "
Pico Iyer
Moment
Surprise
Me
" A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet. "
Pico Iyer
Reading
Writer
Lines
" Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer. "
Pico Iyer
Years
Ahead
Great
" The less you struggle with a problem, the more it's likely to solve itself. The less time you spend frantically running around, the more productive you are likely to be. "
Pico Iyer
Running
Struggle
You
" Movement is a fantastic privilege... but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to. "
Pico Iyer
Back
You
Privilege
" I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did. "
Pico Iyer
Me
Love
Need
" Abjure all accretions and turn off the lights. Put on some music - Leonard Cohen, say, perhaps his 'Various Positions' - and let your mind cool down. Soon you'll forget there's a word called 'stress.' "
Pico Iyer
Music
You
Stress
" In barely one generation, we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. "
Pico Iyer
More
Trying
Us
" I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied. "
Pico Iyer
World
Like
Never
" It's only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. "
Pico Iyer
Listening
Day
Voice
" A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about. "
Pico Iyer
Day
You
Too
" 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. "
Pico Iyer
Change The World
Moment
Change
" I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation. "
Pico Iyer
I Can
School
Birthday
" 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. "
Pico Iyer
Past
Explore
Island
" Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love because suddenly, all your senses are at the setting marked 'on.' Suddenly, you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. "
Pico Iyer
Me
Patterns
Love
" Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself. "
Pico Iyer
Past
Home
Yourself
" I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within. "
Pico Iyer
Travel
Journey
Think
" A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure. "
Pico Iyer
Challenge
Adventure
Hungry
" Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world. "
Pico Iyer
Fun
World
Think
" Wherever we are, any time of night or day, our bosses, junk-mailers, our parents can get to us. Sociologists have actually found that in recent years Americans are working fewer hours than 50 years ago, but we feel as if we're working more. We have more and more time-saving devices, but sometimes, it seems, less and less time. "
Pico Iyer
Working
Day
Parents
" Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. "
Pico Iyer
Daily
Worry
Think
" We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. "
Pico Iyer
Say
Ways
More
" I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it. "
Pico Iyer
Find
Say
Write
" 'Globalization' has become the great tag phrase, but when we talk about it, it's nearly always in terms of the global marketplace or communications technology - either data or goods that are whizzing around. We forget that people are whizzing around more and more. On them, it takes a toll. "
Pico Iyer
People
Technology
Great
" It's an old principle, as old as the Buddha or Marcus Aurelius: We need at times to step away from our lives in order to put them in perspective. Especially if we wish to be productive. "
Pico Iyer
Need
Perspective
Wish
" I think at this point I only write books about questions I really want to figure out. They're indulgences, essentially. I think, 'What would I like to spend five years really thinking about? What could I gain from thinking about for five years?' "
Pico Iyer
Think
Thinking
Questions
" It takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail, researchers have found, and yet the average person receives such an interruption every 11 minutes. Which means that we're never caught up; we're always out of breath, running behind. "
Pico Iyer
Never
Always
Phone Call
" I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling. But there's something about it that you can't turn away from. "
Pico Iyer
You
Never
Turn
" I've yet to use a cellphone, and I've never tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event. "
Pico Iyer
Survive
Day
Long
" In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe. "
Pico Iyer
Space
Music
Beauty