Pico Iyer Quotes

Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies.

I'm happy in what I do, and I just like cracking on, doing what I love. The people around me know who I am, and that's what means the most.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness

Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.

Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.

I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.

I spend plenty of time in London and it doesn't scare me, but it's a lonely place, even if you've got friends there. My job takes me all around the world, meeting lots of interesting people. But I think if I couldn't get home, if I couldn't get back to what I consider my real life I'd be frightened.

In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

Money is not the most important thing, but when you need it, there are few substitutes. So while I like the things money can buy, I love what money won't buy. It bought me a house but it won't buy me a home. It would buy me a companion but it won't buy me a friend.

The activity of being a husband, a father - those are roles, too, but underneath them is the spiritual center that connects us all, and that's what's most important.

You can take the boy out of England, but you can't take England out of the boy. And ummm, yes, I feel a huge emotional attachment to England.

I perceive and relate to the world through where I grew up; that's part of me. It's what I judge everything else against.

Home is where my dignity lives, not necessarily where my ancestors put down roots.

I have my relationship with God and myself, and that's what matters to me. I really don't care what most people think.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

The difference between guilt and shame is very clear--in theory. We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. A person feels guilt because he did something wrong. A person feels shame because he is something wrong. We may feel guilty because we lied to our mother. We may feel shame because we are not the person our mother wanted us to be.

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home.

I’ve learned that home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.

Your heart is your home, and all roads lead to home.

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

Home is the place you return to when you have finally lost your soul. Home is the place where life is born, not the place of your birth, but the place where you seek rebirth. When you no longer have to remember which tale of your own past is true and which is an invention, when you know that you are an invention, then is the time to seek out your home. Perhaps only when you have come to understand that can you finally reach home.

Do not mistake desire for love. Desire leaves home in a frantic search for one gratification after another. Love is at home with itself.

The true state of the union lies in your heart, and in your home.

Our home, our special country, is for all of us the place where we find liberation; a very difficult word ... that tries to describe something that can't be described but is the only thing worth having.