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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
Feel
Feels
Luxurious
Distraction
Paying
Attention
Age
Nothing

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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There's so much visible stuff around now, we're tempted to forget that it's usually the invisible that matters most.
Pico Iyer
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I often think we're most happy when we forget the time.
Pico Iyer
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Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
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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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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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
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When I was two years old, I heard about his [Dalai Lama] flight from Tibet. Being very little, I said, Oh, good Tibetans, bad Chinese. Those were the black-and-white ways that I thought.
Pico Iyer
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For citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands.
Pico Iyer
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Literally, when you wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning in Havana you don't know where you'll be at noon. But it's a safe guess that you'll either be married, arrested, or in the midst of some incredible transaction where somebody is stealing your passport or paying you in Dominican pesos for it, or whatever. It's a wild place.
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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I'd spent thirty years visiting the Dalai Lama, and twenty years as a journalist going to difficult places, war zones and revolutions from North Korea to Haiti and Beirut to Sri Lanka, and the question came up: What does this man have to offer to this world which seems so torn up and so attached to conflict?
Pico Iyer
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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
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Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.
Pico Iyer
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The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
Pico Iyer
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I think people like me are in a relatively privileged position because we have to some extent chosen to live in foreign places. I would always make the distinction between those who are exiles in terms of being thrown out of the place they want to be, and others who are exiles in terms of going toward a place they would rather be.
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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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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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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Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.
Pico Iyer
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I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would.
Pico Iyer