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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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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
People
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Always
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More quotes by Pico Iyer

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For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.
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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.
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Dalai Lama has not coming to show us his kindness, so that we can enjoy his charisma, he's coming with a specific message for the specific circumstances of the world today.
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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.
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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.
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More than any religious figure that I can think of, Dalai Lama goes out of his way to attend interfaith conferences religious harmony is one of his urgent priorities in life.
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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.
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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.
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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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I often think we're most happy when we forget the time.
Pico Iyer
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The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
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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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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
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Just as there are many more Californians now to be found in the temples of Kyoto or the villages of Bali or the mountains of the Himalayas than ever before, what is also exciting is that one can just go downtown Santa Barbara and find ayurvedic medicine, Thai restaurants, and Japanese cars in abundance.
Pico Iyer
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Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.
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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The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.
Pico Iyer
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Most of us who have been lucky enough to hear, read and see the Dalai Lama, often come away thinking, What a kind, inspiring and golden human being! That is true, but I think it does him an injustice.
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.
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