Iyer Quotes

The ultimate purpose of Zen,' I remembered the roshi telling me, 'is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion. ~ Pico Iyer

Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep, but the place where you stand. ~ Pico Iyer

As I wandered around the room, with Sachiko by my side, I began to think how much we need space in those we love, space enough to accommodate growth and possibility. Knowledge must leave room for mystery; intimacy, taken too far, was the death of imagination. Keeping some little distance from her was, I thought, a way of keeping an open space, a silence for the imagination to fill.
"At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things," Thoreau had written, "we require that all things be mysterious and unexplainable. ~ Pico Iyer

Any school would gain, if the students began the day with meditation, cleared their heads and got themselves centered. ~ Pico Iyer

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

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

The quintessential Japanese balance, I thought: to surrender all of yourself to an illusion, and yet somewhere, in some part of yourself, to know all the while that it is an illusion. ~ Pico Iyer

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

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. ~ Pico Iyer

Mythili looked at her daughter with contempt. "Proof is required by those who don't have faith. Have I ever asked for proof of existence of Ranganathar? A stranger requires evidence. I know my husband like the back of my hand. I don't need any proof or evidence. If there is one against him, it must be wrong. He is incapable of crime. I am proud of him. ~ Hariharan Iyer

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson. ~ Pico Iyer

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

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

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

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

And just as it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love - our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything - so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk. ~ Pico Iyer

It is possible to bathe in nonsense ... to be refreshed by it. ~ Lars Iyer

As they passed through the exit, Indrani pulled Zarina's stole over her head, covering half of her face. The two words - not guilty - had changed Zarina's stature in minutes, from a relentless human rights activist to someone running for cover. They climbed down the stairs and rushed to the parking lot. Zarina's car was in a pathetic condition - smashed windscreen, deflated tyres, broken rear view mirrors and torn upholstery. An exasperated Zarina raised her hands in utter disgust. Mob fury. Idiots, if they have won the case, let them celebrate their victory; why smash my car? The fighter in her forced Zarina to take out her cell phone and click pictures of her car from different angles. ~ Hariharan Iyer

I do think it's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about ... and find a home. ~ Pico Iyer

The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man. ~ Pico Iyer

the secret of life is not to do what you like but to like what you do ~ Karthik Iyer

I can very well understand your frustration, but you must stick to your dreams. Try Harder! ~ K. Hari Kumar

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

Greatest surprises I have encountered has been that the people who seem wisest about the necessity of placing limits on the newest technologies are, often, precisely the ones who helped develop those technologies, which have bulldozed over so many of the limits of old. The very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down. ~ Pico Iyer

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

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves. ~ Pico Iyer

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice ~ Pico Iyer

It's an old principle, as old as the Buddha or Marcus Aurelius: We need at times to step away from our lives in order to put them in perspective. Especially if we wish to be productive. ~ Pico Iyer

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

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

To step away from the world isn't to draw back; it's actually a way to tune in. ~ Pico Iyer

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

The beauty of any first time is that it leads to a thousand others ... ~ Pico Iyer

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

[The Dalai Lama ] says Western traditions can teach Tibetans a lot about social action, and he thinks some Christians are very good at that. ~ Pico Iyer

She liked it? 'I love it
the way you'd love an orphan, or a bird with a broken foot. ~ Pico Iyer

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

Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them. ~ Pico Iyer

We can't change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world - and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment. ~ Pico Iyer

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

The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with. ~ Pico Iyer

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

[The Dalai Lama] told me some years ago, "I've made every concession to China, and I've been as open and tolerant as I could, and still things get worse in Tibet." If you look at it from one point of view, as he himself says, his monastic position of forbearance and nonviolence hasn't reaped any benefits. And yet, he's thinking in terms of the long term, of centuries. ~ Pico Iyer

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

I've also learned from [Dalai Lama] that we make the world by how we choose to look at it. In any situation you can make it constructive or dismaying, depending on that powerful computer we call the mind. ~ Pico Iyer

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. ~ Pico Iyer

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

Nw a kind of no-man's-land occupied by a neo-Elizabethan hugger-mugger of racketeers, drug dealers, gangsters and abortionists, the shark-toothed area seemed only a rowdier version of the city all around - a freewheeling, free-spending center of free enterprise. ~ Pico Iyer

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. ~ Pico Iyer

As she crossed the defence team, Indrani saw Sesha sitting in a chair with his legs crossed and looking cool and composed. Mythili, who was by his side, was offering him coffee from a flask. As if they were in a cinema house waiting for the movie to resume after intermission. When everything pointed to an adverse verdict, how could he be so relaxed? He was typing something into his cell phone; perhaps tweeting. He had a massive following on Twitter. It ranged from simple appreciation for his administrative prowess to absolute fetish over everything about him - his trademark cotton pants and shirt, which had become a rage among his female fans, his Santro car, which had become a symbol of simplicity and his frugal dietary habits, which somehow raised him to a sainthood and absolved him of anything wicked. The more the mainstream media like TV and newspapers worked against him, the stronger was the support he got from his Twitter followers. ~ Hariharan Iyer

Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart. ~ Pico Iyer

Soon after we first got to know each other, I asked him a typical traveler's question: How did he deal with jet lag? He looked at me, surprised. "For me a flight is just a brief retreat in the sky," Matthieu said, as if amazed that the idea didn't strike everyone. "There's nothing I can do, so it's really quite liberating. There's nowhere else I can be. So I just sit and watch the clouds and the blue sky. Everything is still and everything is moving. It's beautiful." Clouds and blue sky, of course, are how Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn't mean a blue sky isn't always there behind the obscurations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again. His ~ Pico Iyer

The Sufis, like all mystics, are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home. ~ Pico Iyer

Yet [Dalai Lama] has said very strongly that basic freedoms of thought and speech have to be respected in Tibet and they're not at the moment. Tolerance doesn't mean accepting what's unfair. ~ Pico Iyer

Don't underestimate the power of a celebrity lawyer, especially if she had been a public prosecutor or advocate general in the past. She can barge into the court of any senior judge and obtain a stay on the arrest of a person. She can force a Supreme Court or a High Court bench to meet at midnight to hear her case. And Indrani is notorious for trying to bribe judges for getting favourable judgements. Of course, all these are backroom manoeuvres and no one gets to know them. ~ Hariharan Iyer

So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation. ~ Pico Iyer

There is pencil in a pencil box, but there isn't any school in school bag. ~ J Visweswar Iyer

He [Dalai Lama] feels, and I feel, and everyone feels the suffering and frustration of the Tibetans who long for action, who long for a militant response. But, in some ways very few of those individuals have ever been in the position of being head of state. ~ Pico Iyer

Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. ~ Pico Iyer

If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards. ~ Pico Iyer

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. ~ Pico Iyer

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

Everything begins when you understand that you, and you above all, are Max Brod: this, for W., is the founding principle. That you (whoever you are) are Max Brod, and everyone else (whoever that might be) is Franz Kafka. Which is to say, you will never understand anyone else and are endlessly guilty before them, and that even with the greatest effort of loyalty, you will betray them at every turn. ~ Lars Iyer

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

I romanticised Mancunian despair, W says. I didn't realise that Mancunian despair is only the desire to leave Manchester ~ Lars Iyer

The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing. ~ Pico Iyer

... you could help people most by not giving them the burden of your heart. ~ Pico Iyer

A man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing. ~ Pico Iyer

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

You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is ... frozen. ~ Pico Iyer

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

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

If a book doesn't make you want to throw it aside and think your own thoughts, what use is it? ~ Lars Iyer

Anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around - you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life. ~ Pico Iyer

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

When Pico [Iyer] talks about home being a place of isolation, I think he's right. But it's the paradox. I think that's why I so love Great Salt Lake. Every day when I look out at that lake, I think, "Ah, paradox" - a body of water than no one can drink. It's the liquid lie of the desert. But I think we have those paradoxes within us and certainly the whole idea of home is windswept with paradox. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

He [The Dalai Lama] has made it his mission to say, "We can't afford to squabble over minor differences, we have to concentrate on what we have in common, our common mission, our common culture - and indeed what we have in common with the rest of the world." ~ Pico Iyer

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

Unlike many spiritual leaders, Dalai Lama is never been in a position to just sit on a mountain top handing out wisdom. He's had to live out his principles in the middle of this very complex situation, every day for sixty years or more. I think it's something that moves many people about his example. ~ Pico Iyer

When love is a commodity, you wonder why anyone's giving it away for free. Or what the hidden costs might be. ~ Pico Iyer

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

Expectation is the greatest impediment to living, running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today. ~ Lars Iyer

Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think ... In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think. ~ Pico Iyer

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end. ~ Pico Iyer

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

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.
The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain. ~ Pico Iyer

I think about Rilke, who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer I believe it is our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity. Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.

... I write out of my questions. Hopefully, if we write out of our humanity, our vulnerable nature, then some chord is struck with a reader and we touch on the page. I know that is why I read, to find those parts of myself in a story that I cannot turn away from. The writers who move me are the ones who create beauty and truth out of their sufferings, their yearnings, their discoveries. It is what I call the patience of words born out of the search.

... Perhaps as writers we are really storytellers, finding that golden thread that connects us to the past, present, and future at once. I love language and landscape. For me, writing is the correspondence between these two passions. It is difficult to ever see yourself. I don't know how I've developed or grown as a writer. I hope I am continuing to take risks on the page. I hope I am continuing to ask the hard questions of myself. If we are attentive to the world and to those around us, I believe we will be attentive on the page. Writing is about presen ~ Terry Tempest Williams

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 rebel against your parents until you become them. One day you look in the mirror and you see your father's face. ~ Pico Iyer

The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it "has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult." Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real ... "the Universe itself is the scripture of Zen." Pico Iyer from introduction. ~ Peter Matthiessen

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

Yes, I love that word "absorption" because I think that's my definition of happiness. I think all of us know we are happiest when we forget ourselves, when we forget the time, when we lose ourselves in a beautiful piece of music or a movie or a deep conversation with a friend or an intimate encounter with someone we love. That's our definition of happiness. ~ Pico Iyer

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

Even though more and more of his stories, as he went on, are set in autumn, one of the main occupations of his characters is to see how far they've come, or fallen rather, since the spring. Yet insofar as spring - youth - is visible, there's always the possibility of vicarious renewal or hopefulness, and the mixed feelings of seeing someone else's perhaps too-innocent illusions. ~ Pico Iyer

For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. ~ Pico Iyer

Unfortunately Mythili, sexual harassment is such a crime…in fact, it is viewed as a sin rather than a crime. You keep quiet and they say that it confirms your guilt. You defend yourself; you become a misogynist. I've seen retired judges, high ranking income tax officers, celluloid celebrities and many others falling prey to sexual harassment charges. In many cases, the alleged victims do not even cooperate with the police to prove their charge. They throw the charge and vanish. But the public opinion is permanently aligned against the alleged perpetrators. ~ Hariharan Iyer

Exhibiting nervousness would amount to weakness in public perception and nobody liked a weak leader. Showing bravado was the norm among Tamil Nadu politicians when faced with court cases. Even in the face of mounting evidence against them, they would behave as if it was business-as-usual. And if the verdict went against them, their usual refrain would be "judgement had been 'bought' rather than delivered." Sesha could not stoop to their level, but still he had to put up a brave front at least till the judgement was delivered. ~ Hariharan Iyer

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

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