The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with.
Interpretation
Affinity can create a deep connection with strangers that feels stronger than with those we know well.
This quote reflects on the profound and often inexplicable connections we can feel with others, particularly strangers. Pico Iyer expresses that affinity transcends logical understanding and can create an immediate sense of familiarity and emotional bond, even in a crowded space where one might expect to feel isolated or disconnected. It suggests that the essence of relationships can be rooted in feelings and intuitions that aren’t always clear or rational.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of human connections at a community event.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
The venom clamours of a jealous woman poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.
A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.
We must be our own before we can be another's.
Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it’ll always get you the right ones
It's hard enough to celebrate being Asian in normal times. But now, when the whole world is kind of coming down, with all this rhetoric and people getting attacked on the street, you really need to deliberately try to celebrate Asian-ness.
Civil marriage, like all civil rights provided by the government, must be provided equally to all Americans.
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