When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go on, we come to find that we become our parents. Pico Iyer Read Quote
Like any traveler, I’m always looking for those experiences that are almost unique to any place, and watching films around Alaska of the skies in winter made me want to taste those unworldly showers of light in person. Pico Iyer Read Quote
All of us are feeling scattered and distracted as we try to keep up with an accelerating world. But nearly all of us have an answer in our hands, in simply choosing to do nothing and go nowhere for a while. Pico Iyer Read Quote
If I was a parent or a kid, I would need a cell phone, and those things are invaluable, but my kids are out of the house now, and I am thrilled when I wake up to not have a cell phone, and feel like today is stretching out in front of me for 1,000 hours, as it seems. Pico Iyer Read Quote
Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it’s almost a journey into faith and doubt at once. Pico Iyer Read Quote
I’m very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can’t think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not. Pico Iyer Read Quote
The recipe to an unhappy life in Japan is to want to be Japanese if you are not. Anyone who wants to penetrate the country is setting themselves up for tears and disappointment. Pico Iyer Read Quote
To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath. Pico Iyer Read Quote
The less you struggle with a problem, the more it’s likely to solve itself. The less time you spend frantically running around, the more productive you are likely to be. Pico Iyer Read Quote
In financial terms, my sense is that the distribution of wealth, unequal as it is, is self-perpetuating, and, especially in a linked and accelerating world, the rich get ever more quickly richer while the poor get ever more speedily poorer. Pico Iyer Read Quote
