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" Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer. "
Pico Iyer
Years
Ahead
Great
Related Quotes:
" One of the happier ironies of recent history is that even as Tibet is being wiped off the map in Tibet itself, here it is in California, in Switzerland, in Japan. All over the world, Tibetan Buddhism is now part of the neighborhood. In 1968, there were two Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West. By 2000, there were 40 in New York alone. "
Pico Iyer
New York
World
Map
" I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me. "
Pico Iyer
Travel
Time
Interesting
" You need to rebel to see the other options and to get a much richer, fuller sense of the world. And it's only once you've worked through that and seen through that that you can come back and accept who you are. You have to try all the other options. "
Pico Iyer
Accept
You
World
" Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once. "
Pico Iyer
Journey
Life
Writing
" Hello Kitty will never speak. "
Pico Iyer
Never
Hello
Will
" Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go? "
Pico Iyer
Game
Fun
Communication
" 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
" Japan functions on the basis of everyone sharing certain assumptions, where each person knows his part in a larger whole. The foreigner sits outside and is threatening. If he comes in, that's the most threatening of all. "
Pico Iyer
Everyone
Assumptions
Sharing
" American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams. "
Pico Iyer
Hearts
Only
America
" Like any traveler, I'm always looking for those experiences that are almost unique to any place, and watching films around Alaska of the skies in winter made me want to taste those unworldly showers of light in person. "
Pico Iyer
Looking
Light
Unique
" I'm very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can't think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not. "
Pico Iyer
Happy
Place
I Am
" Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight. "
Pico Iyer
Gone
World
Too Much
" 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. "
Pico Iyer
I Am
Wake Up
Today
" 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. "
Pico Iyer
Prayer
October
School
" 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
" '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
" The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. "
Pico Iyer
Teach
Best
Information
" 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
" 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
" People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects. "
Pico Iyer
Me
Day
Speak
" 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
" 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
" If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals. "
Pico Iyer
Music
Will
End
" A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about. "
Pico Iyer
Day
You
Too
" We all know how we can be turned around by a magic place; that's why we travel, often. And yet we all know, too, that the change cannot be guaranteed. Travel is a fool's paradise, Emerson reminded us, if we think that we can find anything far off that we could not find at home. "
Pico Iyer
Change
Travel
Think
" For centuries, Cuba's greatest resource has been its people. "
Pico Iyer
Resource
Greatest
People
" I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness. "
Pico Iyer
Never
My Life
Life
" 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. "
Pico Iyer
First Time
Time
Consciousness
" In Japan, I live in a little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I don't have a bicycle or a car or anything, so my only movement is within the boundaries of my feet. I feel there's a need for that kind of conscientious objection to the momentum of the world. "
Pico Iyer
Feet
World
Feel
" Though I knew that poverty certainly didn't buy happiness, I wasn't convinced that money did, either. "
Pico Iyer
Poverty
Buy
Either