Feasting on Pico Iyer

“In an age of speed, I began to think nothing could be more exhilarating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

“Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself.”

— Pico Iyer

“Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.”

— Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer Quote: “A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.”

— Pico Iyer

“In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

— Pico Iyer

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves.”

— Pico Iyer

“Going nowhere 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

“Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”

— Pico Iyer

“We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.”

— Pico Iyer

“And it’s only by going nowhere – by sitting still or letting my mind relax – that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.”

— Pico Iyer

“Its no coincidence that the word holiday suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.”

— Pico Iyer

“For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.”

— 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

“It so often happens that somebody says ‘change your life’ and you repaint your car rather than re-wire the engine.”

— Pico Iyer

“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

“My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.”

— Pico Iyer

“The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.”

— Pico Iyer

“Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?”

— Pico Iyer

“Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you’re really seeing are not his limitations but yours.”

— Pico Iyer

“For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.”

— Pico Iyer

“In the past, Ive 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

“Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways.”

— Pico Iyer

“Movement is a fantastic privilege but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to.”

— Pico Iyer

“American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.”

— Pico Iyer

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

— Pico Iyer

“All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.”

— Pico Iyer


“Hello Kitty will never speak.”

— Pico Iyer

“Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective.”

— 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

“In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.”

— Pico 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

“But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.”

— Pico Iyer

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

— 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


“Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.”

— Pico Iyer

“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

“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

“Travel is an act of humility.”

— 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

“For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, Wheres your home? I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.”

— Pico Iyer

“Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.”

— Pico Iyer

“To step away from the world isn’t to draw back; it’s actually a way to tune in.”

— Pico Iyer

“The more we run from a problem, the more we’re actually running into it.”

— Pico Iyer

“The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.”

— 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

“Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them.”

— Pico Iyer

“So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.”

— Pico Iyer

“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