Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.

— Pico Iyer

... a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.

— Pico Iyer

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

— Pico Iyer

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

— Pico Iyer

... Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.

— Pico Iyer

Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go?

— Pico Iyer

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

— Pico Iyer

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

— Pico Iyer

For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, 'Where's your home?' I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.

— Pico Iyer

...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

— Pico Iyer