Top 100 Pico Iyer Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.”

— Pico Iyer

52. “The Australians, it seems to me, thrive on their remoteness from the world and see it as a way of keeping up a code of “No worries, mate,” while peddling their oddities to visitors: nonconformity is at once a fact of life for many, and a selling point.”

— Pico Iyer

53. “We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.”

— Pico Iyer

54. “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.”

— Pico Iyer

55. “All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.”

— Pico Iyer

56. “Travel is an act of humility.”

— Pico Iyer

57. “Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.”

— Pico Iyer

58. “Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.”

— Pico Iyer

59. “To step away from the world isn’t to draw back; it’s actually a way to tune in.”

— Pico Iyer

60. “So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.”

— Pico Iyer

61. “Perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in LA thinks he knows Cambodia because he’s seen The Killing Fields on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows LA because he’s seen City of Angels on video.”

— Pico Iyer

62. “So much of our lives takes place in our heads – in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation – that sometimes I feel that I can change my life by changing the way I look at it.”

— Pico Iyer

63. “Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them.”

— Pico Iyer

64. “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

65. “To do what I want, and not to do what I won’t – this is why I entered such a life.”

— Pico Iyer

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

— Pico Iyer

67. “I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.”

— Pico Iyer

68. “Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.”

— Pico Iyer

69. “When love is a commodity, you wonder why anyone’s giving it away for free. Or what the hidden costs might be.”

— Pico Iyer

70. “For citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands.”

— Pico Iyer

71. “What if?” points in both directions.”

— Pico Iyer

72. “One of the strange laws of the contemplative life,” Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, “is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.”

— Pico Iyer

73. “Now I see it’s in the spaces where nothing is happening that one has to make a life.”

— Pico Iyer

74. “Anyone reading this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes – which means we’re never caught up with our lives.”

— Pico Iyer

75. “I suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life.”

— Pico Iyer

76. “Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.”

— Pico Iyer

77. “Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.”

— Pico Iyer

78. “Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.”

— Pico Iyer

79. “As soon as I’m on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.”

— Pico Iyer

80. “Everywhere you turned, everything was happening, and everything that was happening took you away from all abstraction and into something human, where answers weren’t so easy.”

— Pico Iyer

81. “None of the things in life – like love or faith – was arrived at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder.”

— Pico Iyer

82. “When you’re hurrying around too quickly,” he had said, “there’s a part of the world you can’t see. If, for example, you’re taking a wrong direction in your life, it’s only when you stop and look at things clearly that you can revise your direction and take a more proper course. Then message of Zen is that in order to find ourselves, we’ve got to learn to stop.”

— Pico Iyer

83. “Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.”

— Pico Iyer

84. “As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn’t matter where or how far you go – the farther commonly the worse – the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.”

— Pico Iyer

85. “The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.”

— Pico Iyer

86. “Even as we fret about the changes our progress wreaks in the air and on the airwaves, in forests and on streets, we hardly worry about the change it is working in ourselves, the new kind of soul that is being born out of a new kind of life. Yet this could be the most dangerous development of all, and the least examined. “ -Pico Iyer.”

— Pico Iyer

87. “But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us.”

— Pico Iyer

88. “Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.”

— Pico Iyer

89. “How to adjust to a world in which the climax of a scene – and sometimes the central event – is going to sleep? We’re going to have to adapt, maybe even invert our sense of priority and our assumptions about what constitutes drama, as most of us foreigners have to do when traveling to Japan.”

— Pico Iyer

90. “A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.”

— Pico Iyer

91. “A lack of affiliation may mean a lack of accountability, and forming a sense of commitment can be hard without a sense of community. Displacement can encourage the wrong kinds of distance, and if the nationalism we see sparking up around the globe arises from too narrow and fixed a sense of loyalty, the internationalism that’s coming to birth may reflect too roaming and undefined a sense of belonging.”

— Pico Iyer

92. “If you grow up between cultures, if you get accustomed to traveling, it’s easy to find yourself always on the outside of things, looking in. This can be ideal for a writer – or a spy; you’ve always got, analytically, a ticket out.”

— Pico Iyer

93. “I worry that travel is becoming more a form of consumerism, whether you live in Santa Monica or Shanghai, than a real exercise in curiosity, and that as the world grows more open and available, going to another country will seem more like going to a cool ethnic supermarket or trendy restaurant than a true journey into shock or difference.”

— Pico Iyer

94. “Speech is dangerous in Japan, precisely because so many unspoken rules hover around it. It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you” – too intrusive – and there are said to be twenty ways of saying “I.” Women are expected to refer to themselves in the third person, men not. A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in twenty-nine different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or twenty-seven other things.”

— Pico Iyer

95. “You’re not writing a biography?” Mike now asked. “Oh no. The opposite. A counterbiography, as it were. I don’t think you find someone by going to where he lived, least of all someone as shifting and undomesticated as Greene. I’m interested in the things that lived inside him. His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us.”

— Pico Iyer

96. “One of the strange laws of the contemplative life,” Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, “is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.” Or, as Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek – and in many other places – has it, “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.”

— Pico Iyer

97. “The mother of Jesus, I sometimes remember, was visited by an angel and is seen as a saint; the mother of the Buddha died at his birth. Is it any surprise that Buddhism is about learning to live with loss, while Christianity is about salvation from above?”

— Pico Iyer

98. “We now have access, increasingly, to more and more cultures across the globe, and the result is that restlesness has gone global, and hopdfulness, and the sense of an answer being found somewhere else.”

— Pico Iyer

99. “There’s one problem with California.” I wasn’t eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. “It has no understanding of evil.”

— Pico Iyer

100. “Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere. Our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we’re sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences. Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art. Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.”

— Pico Iyer