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" The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. "
Pico Iyer
Seem
More
Desperate
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" I think the world is always going to be as diverse as it always has been. "
Pico Iyer
Going
World
Think
" Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise. "
Pico Iyer
World
Experience
Writing
" 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
" 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 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
" Hello Kitty will never speak. "
Pico Iyer
Never
Hello
Will
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Places have charisma, in short, as much as people do. "
Pico Iyer
Short
Charisma
Much
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Travel for me is all about transformation, and I'm fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they'd have written off not a month before. "
Pico Iyer
Back
Travel
Transformation
" 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. "
Pico Iyer
Game
Happiness
Happy
" The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with. "
Pico Iyer
Step
Know
Friends
" 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
" I couldn't follow the events of September 11 because I was proofreading a novel I'd just completed - on Islam and its quarrel with the West - that I'd promised, six months earlier, to deliver to my editor on September 12, 2001. "
Pico Iyer
Follow
Islam
West
" 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
" In Vancouver, in Sydney and in Orange County, we live among fluorescent stores and streets so brightly lit that you can read a book after dark; in other places across our global body, there are blackouts and curfews every night. "
Pico Iyer
Night
Dark
Book
" 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. "
Pico Iyer
Moving
Human
Breath
" To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish. "
Pico Iyer
See
Wish
Behind
" 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
" My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible. "
Pico Iyer
Myself
Me
Christmas
" 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 financial terms, my sense is that the distribution of wealth, unequal as it is, is self-perpetuating, and, especially in a linked and accelerating world, the rich get ever more quickly richer while the poor get ever more speedily poorer. "
Pico Iyer
Financial
Poor
World
" 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
" '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
" American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams. "
Pico Iyer
Hearts
Only
America