Places that Every Traveler has Missed

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And 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

“A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.”
― Pico Iyer

“...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.”
― Pico Iyer, The Man Within My Head

“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 couldn’t make sense to myself, or to the world outside.”
― Pico Iyer

“As Thoreau famously said, it doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.”
― Pico Iyer

“Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice.”
― Pico Iyer

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

“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

“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, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

“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

“... epiphanies rarely repeat themselves.”
― Pico Iyer, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

“Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.”
― Pico Iyer, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

“None of the things in life - like love or faith - was arrived at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“A lack of affiliation may mean a lack of accountability, and forming a sense of commitment can be hard without a sense of community. Displacement can encourage the wrong kinds of distance, and if the nationalism we see sparking up around the globe arises from too narrow and fixed a sense of loyalty, the internationalism that's coming to birth may reflect too roaming and undefined a sense of belonging.”
― 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

“Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?”
― Pico Iyer, The Man Within My Head

“You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly, that you'll never really make it back into the light.”
― Pico Iyer, Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign

“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, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

“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, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

“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, Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East

“...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to be 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

“Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.”
― Pico Iyer, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

“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 Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“It’s not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them;”
― Pico Iyer, The Virtue of Stillness

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

“One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.”
― Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

“It's kind of spooky sometimes,' a Canadian lawyer said to me one day. 'There you are, in the Kim Do Hotel, it's ninety-three degrees outside, and it's April eighth, and you're listening to a Vietnamese cover version of Jingle Bells.”
― Pico Iyer, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

“Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.”
― Pico Iyer