Pico Mundo Quotes

Pico Mundo is a prosperous town. But no degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity. ~ Dean Koontz

Oleander will kill you quickly. Azaleas, ingested, take a few hours. Vomiting, paralysis, seizures, coma, death. Then there's savin, henbane, foxglove, jimsonweed ... all here in Pico Mundo."
"And we call her Mother Nature."
"There's nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either," Ozzie said. ~ Dean Koontz

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

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

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

Admittedly great though these reasons be, they are not the principal grounds, that is, those which may rightfully claim for themselves the privilege of the highest admiration. ~ Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

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

Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn't agree with you, but because you don't agree with something. It's not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one's journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you're still moving in the direction of your dreams. ~ Pico Iyer

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

Has spending more time with her stopped you thinking she's perfect?" I asked.
Pico smiled. "No. She's perfect. But I do understand her better. She's the perfect Athene, and that includes a certain amount of pride and vanity and temper."
"But surely - you know I'm not perfect!"
"But you are," he said, picking out the books and piling them on the bed. "You are the perfect Apollo. You're the light. And both of you grow and change and become more excellent, while remaining perfect as you are. Perfection isn't static. It's a dynamic form. ~ Jo Walton

We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own, the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou will fix the limits of nature for thyself. I have placed thee at the centre of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honourable, art the molder and maker of thyself. ~ Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

What we have to do is act as clearly and with as pure motivation as is possible now, and that will sow the seeds for good action maybe in the twenty-second century. ~ Pico Iyer

I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated. ~ 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

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. ~ 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

Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love because suddenly, all your senses are at the setting marked 'on.' Suddenly, you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. ~ 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 rebel against your parents until you become them. One day you look in the mirror and you see your father's face. ~ Pico Iyer

Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions. ~ Pico Iyer

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

I thot falling in love was a burden A kind of crowding on my landscape Love creates space, dummy Doesn't take it up ~ Tommy Pico

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals. ~ Pico Iyer

At last the best of artisans ordained that that creature to whom He had been able to give nothing proper to himself should have joint possession of whatever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being. ~ Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

Often when we think of exile we think of destruction or loss. But the Dalai Lama always says exile is reality, it's something we can make use of, and he has used it to get rid of everything that he thought was stifling and old, and to create a new, improved and much healthier Tibet. ~ Pico Iyer

The roots of Campanella's "Solar City" (and the District of Columbia) can be found in deeper occult parallels within the literature formulated by hermetical philosophers Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino in Renaissance Florence; both prophetically predicting the restoration of the Egyptian solar religion as the correct political theology of the planet and itself the model for a "New World" civil religion. In another words they believed the Abrahamic solar faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam would ultimately be exposed as substituted forms of Egyptian sun worship with in "New World" - the United States. It would be this "New World" that would midwife civilization from the waning Piscean Age into the "Masonic" Aquarian Age, a new age of the holy spirit. Simon Greenleaf's Druids and Campanella's Solarians are the de-facto "mediating" Joachimite order through which heavenly signs are mediated by a Sun Priest - an executive or President - who frames policy based upon his knowledge of the correspondences between science (i.e. Egyptian natural religion), grades of being, and heavenly correspondences. This polity was replicated from 1797 within the General Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons with reference both to Enoch (cf. Webb's 1797 Monitor) and the priest king Melchizedek of which the Grand Master DeWitt Clinton became the symbolic presiding executive. This configuration is important to make because it establishes the position of the District of Columbia ~ Robert W. Sullivan IV

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

To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish. ~ Pico Iyer

Most of us who have been lucky enough to hear, read and see the Dalai Lama, often come away thinking, "What a kind, inspiring and golden human being!" That is true, but I think it does him an injustice. ~ 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

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

I'd turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it's harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world. ~ Pico Iyer