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" 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
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" 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
" Though I knew that poverty certainly didn't buy happiness, I wasn't convinced that money did, either. "
Pico Iyer
Poverty
Buy
Either
" 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
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" 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
" 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
" 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 have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. "
Pico Iyer
Say
Ways
More
" 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
" 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
" 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
" A single Dallas Cowboys football game uses up as much electricity as the entire nation of Liberia in those same three hours - one reason the globe, if looked at from a certain height, is a cluster of lights surrounded by enormous patches of dark. "
Pico Iyer
Dark
Three
Lights
" To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath. "
Pico Iyer
Rest
Harmony
Beauty
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Pico Iyer
Feel
Desk
Find
" You can only make sense of the online world by going offline and by getting the wisdom and emotional clarity to know how to make the best use of the Internet. "
Pico Iyer
World
You
Best
" American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams. "
Pico Iyer
Hearts
Only
America
" I think it's in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you. "
Pico Iyer
You
Nature
Human Nature
" The recipe to an unhappy life in Japan is to want to be Japanese if you are not. Anyone who wants to penetrate the country is setting themselves up for tears and disappointment. "
Pico Iyer
Life
Disappointment
You
" A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever. "
Pico Iyer
Us
Forever
Classic
" Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer. "
Pico Iyer
Years
Ahead
Great
" 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
" I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads - in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation - that if I really want to change my life, I might best begin by changing my mind. "
Pico Iyer
Change
Best
Imagination
" 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
" Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. "
Pico Iyer
Almost
Living
Know
" 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
" 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
" There are literally Internet rescue camps in China and Korea to deal with children that are addicted. Internet disorder is maybe going to count as a psychiatric disorder in a couple of years. "
Pico Iyer
China
Years
Internet
" The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology. "
Pico Iyer
Technology
Us
One Thing
" 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