Going Nowhere

“Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.”
― Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

“Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize.”
― Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. —Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz”
― Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

“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, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere