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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.

-Pico Iyer

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Quitting, For Me, Means

Pico Iyer

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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.

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Priorities In Life

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Making A Living

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The Beauty Of Being Foreign Is That It Snaps You Awake.

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I Think China's View Of Freedom Has To Do With Material Wealth And Modernity, And The Dalai's Lama View Of Freedom Is Liberation In The Buddhist Sense, Which Is Freedom From Ignorance And Freedom From Suffering.

As Soon As I'm On The Road, I See, Often Palpably, That I Know Nothing At All, Which Is Always A Great Liberation.

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.

All Good Trips Are, Like Love, About Being Carried Out Of Yourself And Deposited In The Midst Of Terror And Wonder.

I Exult In The Fact I Can See Everywhere With A Flexible Eye; The Very Notion Of Home Is Foreign To Me, As The State Of Foreignness Is The Closest Thing I Know To Home.

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Going Nowhere Isn’t About Turning Your Back On The World; It’s About Stepping Away Now And Then So That You Can See The World More Clearly And Love It More Deeply.

Turning Your Back

Travel Is An Act Of Humility

The Less Conscious One Is Of Being A Writer, The Better The Writing.

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I Often Think We're Most Happy When We Forget The Time.

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For Centuries, Cubas Greatest Resource Has Been Its People.

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In An Age Of Distraction, Nothing Can Feel More Luxurious Than Paying Attention.

That's The Great Advantage Of Being A Foreigner: You're Not Paying Your Dues, But You Are Getting All The Benefits.

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A Holy Day, After All, Is A Day For Considering Everything You Otherwise Think Too Little About.

Serendipity Was My Tour Guide, Assisted By Caprice

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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.

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I Think Dalai Lama Efforts Have Been Heroic.

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I Am Simply A Fairly Typical Product Of A Movable Sensibility, Living And Working In A World That Is Itself Increasingly Small And Increasingly Mongrel. I Am A Multinational Soul On A Multinational Globe On Which More And More Countries Are As Polyglot And Restless As Airports. Taking Planes Seems As Natural To Me As Picking Up The Phone Or Going To School. I Fold Up My Self And Carry It Around As If It Were An Overnight Bag.

In A World Full Of Shifting Borders, Everything Is Happening All At Once In Every Possible Direction.

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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.

I Began Thinking About Why Am I Constructing Almost A Shadow Father Or Ghost Father In My Head Into Graham Greene In Response To The Father Who Created Me? What's Going On Here? I Think A Part Of My Sense Is It's Every Boy's Story. 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.

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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.

Black And White

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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.

One Of The Interesting Things About Los Angeles Is That It's Still Supplying The Whole Of The World With Its Dreams Through Movies And Songs And Tv - Often Of An All-american Family At The Same Time As The Real Los Angeles Is Peopled By Souls From Vietnam, Guatemala, And Korea Who Look Nothing Like The Images Being Beamed Out. I Think All That Is Going To Have To Change And Illusion Is Going To Have To Catch Up With Reality In That Regard.

I'm One Of Those Perverse People Who Likes Being Alone. I Always Took Myself To Be A Community Of One. That's What I Am Comfortable With.

None Of The Things In Life - Like Love Or Faith - Was Arrived At By Thinking; Indeed, One Could Almost Define The Things That Mattered As The Ones That Came As Suddenly As Thunder.

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.

What Is Fascinating About A Place Like Los Angeles Airport Is That It Is Lots And Lots Of People, Many Of Whom Have Saved Up All Their Lives And Channeled All Of Their Energies Toward Coming To The Promised Land Of Abundance And Plenty - The American Dream. But As Soon As They Arrive Here They Get A Crash Course In The American Reality.

I Think That Mass Communications As Well As Mass Travel Have Made The Whole World Available To Us In Ways That They Haven't Been. As With Any Kind Of Freedom, The More Of It That One Has The Greater The Need For Limit And Restraint. But I Think That It's A Nice Challenge To Be Saddled With.

The More Ways We Have To Connect, The More Many Of Us Seem Desperate To Unplug.

As Thoreau Famously Sead, It Doesn't Matter Where Or How Far You Go - The Farther Commonly The Worse - The Important Thing Is How Alive You Are. Writing Of Every Kind Is A Way To Wake Oneself Up And Keep As Alive As When One Has Just Fallen In Love.

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.

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Everyone Is A Wordsworth In Certain Moods, And Every Traveler Seeks Out Places That Every Traveler Has Missed.

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Some People Will Always Ground Themselves Very Strongly In A Piece Of Soil, A Grandmother's Property, A Tiny Plot Of Land, And That's Great. But In The Age Of Movement, There's No Question That The Number Of People Who Don't - Or Can't - Is Growing Exponentially.

There's So Much Visible Stuff Around Now, We're Tempted To Forget That It's Usually The Invisible That Matters Most.

...home Lies In The Things You Carry With You Everywhere And Not The Ones That Tie You Down.

A Lack Of Affiliation May Mean A Lack Of Accountability, And Forming A Sense Of Commitment Can Be Hard Without A Sense Of Community. Displacement Can Encourage The Wrong Kinds Of Distance, And If The Nationalism We See Sparking Up Around The Globe Arises From Too Narrow And Fixed A Sense Of Loyalty, The Internationalism That's Coming To Birth May Reflect Too Roaming And Undefined A Sense Of Belonging.

I Love The Fact That We Can't Explain Coincidences. I Think It's Like Sometimes You Walk Into A Crowded Room And You'll See A Stranger And You Feel As If You Know Her Better Than The Friends That You Came With. And The Very Fact That You Can't Explain It Is What Gives It Its Power, That It Lies In Some Deeper Or Mysterious Realm, I Think.

From The Beginning, I've Stressed That Home Is Something Internal, Invisible, Portable, Especially For Those Of Us With Roots In Many Physical Places; We Have To Root Ourselves In Our Passions, Our Values And Our Deepest Friends. My Home, I've Always Felt, Lies In The Songs And Novels That I Love, In The Wife And Mother That I'm Never Far Away From, In The Monastery To Which I've Been Returning For 25 Years.

A Person Susceptible To "wanderlust" Is Not So Much Addicted To Movement As Committed To Transformation.

You Rebel Against Your Parents Until You Become Them. One Day You Look In The Mirror And You See Your Father's Face.

We Travel To Open Our Hearts And Eyes And Learn More About The World Than Our Newspapers Will Accommodate.

Adventure Today Means Finding One's Way Back To The Silence And Stillness Of A Thousand Years Ago.

We Travel, In Essence, To Become Young Fools Again - To Slow Time Down And Get Taken In, And Fall In Love Once More.

Falling In Love

Writing Is, In The End, That Oddest Of Anomalies: An Intimate Letter To A Stranger.

In Our Appetite For Gossip, We Tend To Gobble Down Everything Before Us, Only To Find, Too Late, That It Is Our Ideals We Have Consumed, And We Have Not Been Enlarged By The Feasts But Only Diminished.

Dalai Lama Is Taking A Subtle And Nuanced View Of Politics And He Is Thinking In Terms Of Events Well Beyond Our Lifetime.

In An Age Of Constant Movement, Nothing Is More Urgent Than Sitting Still.

It So Often Happens That Somebody Says 'change Your Life' And You Repaint Your Car Rather Than Re-wire The Engine.

Changing Your Life

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.

In The End, We Need Two Things To Lead A Balanced Life - A Sense Of The World And A Sense Of Ourselves; It's Like Breathing In And Breathing Out. And If You Can Only Get To Know The World By Stepping Out, And Losing Yourself In Experience, You Can Only Get To Know The Self By Stepping Back, And Finding Yourself In Contemplation. One Without The Other Leads To A Kind Of Madness.

Destinations Are Less Important Than The Spirit You Bring To Them.

In An Age Of Acceleration, Nothing Can Be More Exhilarating Than Going Slow.

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.

Movement Is A Fantastic Privilege But It Ultimately Only Has Meaning If You Have A Home To Go Back To.

Yes, We Know More Than Ever Before, And It's A Wonder That We Get To Inhabit A World Full Of Driverless Cars And 3d Printers. But That Doesn't Mean That We Know Any More About The Essential Things In Life - Love, Faith, Death - And It Would Be Dangerous To Assume We Did. The Only Thing That Gets Us Through Sometimes Is A Proper, Humbled Sense That We Don't Have A Clue, We Can't Be Sure What's Going To Happen Next And Life Will Always Be Much Larger Than Our Ideas Of It.

Finding A Sanctuary, A Place Apart From Time, Is Not So Different From Finding A Faith.

I Like The Way That American Has Become A Kind Of Spiritual Home Even For People Who Have Never Seen It. American Dreams Are Strongest Of All In The Hearts Of People Who Have Only Seen America In Their Dreams. I Think It's Refreshing And Reviving To Go Around The World And See How America Still Occupies This Special Place.

A Comma . . . Catches The Gentle Drift Of The Mind In Thought, Turning In On Itself And Back On Itself, Reversing, Redoubling, And Returning Along The Course Of Its Own Sweet River Music; While The Semicolon Brings Clauses And Thoughts Together With All The Silent Discretion Of A Hostess Arranging Guests Around Her Dinner Table.

I Think [dalai Lama]is Far And Away The Most Solid, Deep-thinking, Far-sighted Politician I've Met, And I've Been A Journalist For 26 Years For Time Magazine, So I've Met A Lot Of Politicians.

It's Impressive That A Man [dalai Lama], On The Day After His Nobel Prize Was Announced, In October, 1989, Said To Me, "i Really Wonder If My Efforts Are Enough?" Most Of Us, If We Just Won The Nobel Prize, Would Think This Is Vindication, Or At Last There's A Chance For Tibet. He's The Rare Person Who Thinks, As A Buddha Would, "i Don't Know If I've Done Enough, I Don't Know If I Will Do Enough."

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