Pico Iyer Quotes

Traveling is a fool's paradise.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves.

Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny.

One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.

For years I drove cross-country, back and forth a dozen times, sometimes on book tour, sometimes just to get lost and found.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

The story of 'Highway' is completely about travel. It is about the fascination of travel to an extent that I don't want to even reach the destination and also being away from society gives you a certain view of the society, so that was the intention of the film.

I am a voyager - and the voyage cannot mean that I stay at home.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.

I haven't found anywhere in the world where I want to be all the time. The best of my life is the moving. I look forward to going.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

I've been a traveller, but I don't travel so much now. I'm trying to do it vicariously through my writing. I'm trying to write books that will draw readers away from their lives but send them back in a more awakened way.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

The journey is my home.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

Journey is my life now.

People think of travel, of movement, as a kind of reprieve from life. But they're wrong. Movement isn't a reprieve. There is no reprieve. Movement is our permanent state.

All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

The great home of the soul is the open road.

We're on a road to nowhere, come on inside. Takin' that ride to nowhere, we'll take that ride. I'm feelin' okay this mornin', and you know, we're on the road to paradise, here we go, here we go.

Life on the open road is liberty... to be alone, to have few needs, to be unknown, everywhere a foreigner and at home, and to walk grandly and solitarily in conquest of the world.

The traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements.