Pico Iyer

More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

Places have charisma, in short, as much as people do.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.

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.

To step away from the world isn't to draw back; it's actually a way to tune in.

Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them.

Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

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.

Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.

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.

Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.

...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.

What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady, to be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together and they would not trust or want to listen to one another. But each is a piece of a stained-glass whole, without which I wouldn’t make sense to myself or to the world outside.

The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.