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

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Snaps
Awake
Foreign
Beauty

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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The Dalai Lama says don't pray for peace, don't wait for peace, don't talk about peace - do it right now.
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Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself.
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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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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.
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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 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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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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Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.
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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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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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
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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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In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
Pico Iyer
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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
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Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.
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 one questions [Dalai Lama's] political actions, it is worth remembering that he's the single most experienced politician on the planet at this moment.
Pico Iyer
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A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.
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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I often think we're most happy when we forget the time.
Pico Iyer