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" 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. "

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" 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

People

Happiness

" The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. "

Pico Iyer

Seem

Desperate

" 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

Islam

West

" 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. "

" The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For centuries, Cuba's greatest resource has been its people. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Never

" I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness. "

" 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

Trying

" 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. "

" A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In the two-room flat where I live in Japan, I try to take time every day to step away from the bombardment of e-mails and opportunities and papers around my desk, for an hour, and just sit on our 30-inch terrace in the sun, reading something sustaining, whether 'The Age of Innocence' or the latest by Colm Toibin. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep, but the place where you stand. "

" 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. "

" 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

Christmas

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go on, we come to find that we become our parents. "