Pico Iyer Quotes

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

I think it's important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.

The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it.

To see some truths you must stand outside and look in.

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.

He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320

You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

A reflection of an exact image is the closest thing to you-so that you can see it-but it's far enough away so that you really understand it. There is real life in this movie, but it hovers just an inch above reality.

I don't think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.

Once you get away from where you're from, you look at it in a different way.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.