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In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Paying
Attention
Age
Nothing
Feel
Feels
Luxurious
Distraction

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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Home is essentially a set of values you carry around with you and, like a turtle or a snail or whatever, home has to be something that is part of you and can be equally a part of you wherever you are. I think that not having a home is a good inducement to creating a metaphysical home and to being able to see it in more invisible ways.
Pico Iyer
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Dalai Lama is very interested in learning from and sharing tips with people in other traditions, but he always stresses that we shouldn't underestimate the important differences between them.
Pico Iyer
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I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.
Pico Iyer
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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. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources – it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources.
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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I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated.
Pico Iyer
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To this day, at my relatively advanced age, I still don't have a place I can really call home. I've never bought property. I just move between temporary base camps. I know that the very notion of home, of having a family or community, is a hard one for me to embrace.
Pico Iyer
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America has a hold on imaginations that no other country does. I think that is partly because it is an immigrant country and there is still a kind of innocence in America that translates very well everywhere in the world.
Pico Iyer
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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
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Our own country seemed more polarized than it's ever been and since the two terrorist attacks of 9/11, religion was in greater disrepute than at any other time in my lifetime.
Pico Iyer
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Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
Pico Iyer
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I've also learned from [Dalai Lama] that we make the world by how we choose to look at it. In any situation you can make it constructive or dismaying, depending on that powerful computer we call the mind.
Pico Iyer
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What we have to do is act as clearly and with as pure motivation as is possible now, and that will sow the seeds for good action maybe in the twenty-second century.
Pico Iyer
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Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.
Pico Iyer
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He [Dalai Lama] feels, and I feel, and everyone feels the suffering and frustration of the Tibetans who long for action, who long for a militant response. But, in some ways very few of those individuals have ever been in the position of being head of state.
Pico Iyer
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In a world full of shifting borders, everything is happening all at once in every possible direction.
Pico Iyer
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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
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As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.
Pico Iyer
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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
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Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.
Pico Iyer