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Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Assisted
Caprice
Serendipity
Tour
Guide
Guides

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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He [The Dalai Lama] has made it his mission to say, We can't afford to squabble over minor differences, we have to concentrate on what we have in common, our common mission, our common culture - and indeed what we have in common with the rest of the world.
Pico Iyer
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I often think we're most happy when we forget the time.
Pico Iyer
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Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself.
Pico Iyer
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I'm one of those perverse people who likes being alone. I always took myself to be a community of one. That's what I am comfortable with.
Pico Iyer
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Dalai Lama is transforming those criteria - and the whole way of conducting politics. He's conducting politics in a much deeper way than most politicians are able to. He's the only politician I know of who's a monk. The Pope, of course, is in a similar position, but the Pope isn't in the same way leading a country of many million people.
Pico Iyer
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For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.
Pico Iyer
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I like the way that American has become a kind of spiritual home even for people who have never seen it. American dreams are strongest of all in the hearts of people who have only seen America in their dreams. I think it's refreshing and reviving to go around the world and see how America still occupies this special place.
Pico Iyer
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Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954 he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics.
Pico Iyer
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So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.
Pico Iyer
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I remember many years ago, I asked [Dalai Lama] about exile and he said: Well, exile is good because it's brought me and my people closer to reality, and reality is almost a shrine before which he sits. Exile brings us up against the wall and forces us to rise to the challenge of the moment.
Pico Iyer
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Living here in California, I think one of the scariest things about California is the fact that it is rewriting its script and changing constantly and so many people don't know who they will be and who they will be with a year from now.
Pico Iyer
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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
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We travel, initially, to lose ourselves and we travel, next to find ourselves.
Pico Iyer
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Silence is something more than just a pause it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think....In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.
Pico Iyer
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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
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[The Dalai Lama ] says Western traditions can teach Tibetans a lot about social action, and he thinks some Christians are very good at that.
Pico Iyer
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The Dalai Lama says Tibet and the modern world can engage in a conversation perhaps Tibet has something to share with the rest of us based on its researches into mind, and we have a lot that we can share with Tibet.
Pico Iyer
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For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with.
Pico Iyer
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Anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around - you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life.
Pico Iyer
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With the war in Iraq, he [Dalai Lama] feels that the causes of that lie maybe hundreds of years ago, and he says, What we do now may have consequences far into the future that we will never see.
Pico Iyer