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" We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. "
Pico Iyer
Say
Ways
More
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" '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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever. "
Pico Iyer
Us
Forever
Classic
" 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
" 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
" It's no coincidence that the word 'holiday' suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat. "
Pico Iyer
Best
Wish
Book
" 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
" 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
" 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
" All of us are feeling scattered and distracted as we try to keep up with an accelerating world. But nearly all of us have an answer in our hands, in simply choosing to do nothing and go nowhere for a while. "
Pico Iyer
Hands
World
Try
" 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
" Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. "
Pico Iyer
Almost
Living
Know
" Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head. "
Pico Iyer
Dark
Try
Know
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about. "
Pico Iyer
Day
You
Too
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" If we want to talk about Gross Natural Product, we have to talk about the King of Bhutan's index of Gross National Happiness, too. Certainly I have found, as many travellers before me, that people in the poorest places are often the readiest to shower me, from an affluent country, with hospitality and kindness. "
Pico Iyer
Me
People
Happiness
" The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. "
Pico Iyer
Seem
More
Desperate
" 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