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 More Quotes by Pico Iyer More Quotes From Pico Iyer But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. Pico Iyer distance should world We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. Pico Iyer eye heart travel I often think we're most happy when we forget the time. Pico Iyer forget thinking What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady, to be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together and they would not trust or want to listen to one another. But each is a piece of a stained-glass whole, without which I wouldn’t make sense to myself or to the world outside. Pico Iyer glasses heart book Any school would gain, if the students began the day with meditation, cleared their heads and got themselves centered. Pico Iyer gains meditation school Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit? Pico Iyer small-moments choices mind Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger Pico Iyer anomalies parent writing A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation. Pico Iyer transformation movement committed Some people will always ground themselves very strongly in a piece of soil, a grandmother's property, a tiny plot of land, and that's great. But in the Age of Movement, there's no question that the number of people who don't - or can't - is growing exponentially. Pico Iyer grandmother land numbers We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. Pico Iyer falling-in-love summer travel I love the fact that we can't explain coincidences. I think it's like sometimes you walk into a crowded room and you'll see a stranger and you feel as if you know her better than the friends that you came with. And the very fact that you can't explain it is what gives it its power, that it lies in some deeper or mysterious realm, I think. Pico Iyer giving lying thinking Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. Pico Iyer sight two travel I think Dalai Lama is always careful about stressing that people be led into the practice by somebody who knows what's going on. Pico Iyer stress practice thinking Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year - or at least forty-five hours - and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Pico Iyer childhood way years All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder. Pico Iyer like-love midst wonder In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished. Pico Iyer appetite gossip too-late The Dalai Lama would say that meditation is something that can help everyone. But he's aware that it can be misused or things can go wrong. Pico Iyer lama meditation helping Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger. Pico Iyer anomalies letters writing A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table. Pico Iyer mind rivers sweet We may be joined these days more by the questions we have in common than by the answers we share. Pico Iyer answers common may
