All of us are Exiles in the World

“One is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.”
― 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 Virtue of Stillness

“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, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto


“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, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto


“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 Virtue of Stillness

“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, Abandon

“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 Virtue of Stillness

“Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.”
― Pico Iyer