Autumn Light Quotes

“Now I see it’s in the spaces where nothing is happening that one has to make a life.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“Autumn is the season of subtractions, the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain. At least four times as many classical poems are set in autumn and spring, the seasons of transition, than in summer and winter. But what that means, I realize as the years pass, is that nothing can be taken for granted; people are on alert, wide awake, ready to seize each day as a blessing because the next one can't be counted on.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“Suffering is the central fact of life, from his Buddhist viewpoint; it’s what we do with it that defines our lives.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“The symbols mean everything if you accept the feelings that they carry.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“This road
No one on it
As autumn ends”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“One wonders if the time will ever come when men . . . will lie down as gracefully and as ripe.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“Dying is the art we have to master, it seems to say— not death; late love settles into us as spring romances never could.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“Hold this moment forever, I tell myself; it may never come again.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“Words have little value in the kingdom of essential things. They're just decorations on the feelings too deep for us to put into syllables.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“You learned about autumn early.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“Is it any wonder that Canada, so generous when it comes to supporting the arts, is also a world leader when it comes to creating community, fashioning a global vision and nurturing an expansive vision of humanity?”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“This road No one on it As autumn ends —BASHO, near Kyoto, weeks before his death”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

“Her kids and I tease her remorselessly about her devotion to cleaning, but of course it’s Hiroko’s deeper cleanliness—her freedom from second thoughts, from the need to gossip, from malice or the hunger for complexity—that is one of her sovereign gifts. Dusting is how she clears her head. Cohen himself, asked about his Zen training, explained, “It’s just house cleaning. From time to time the dust and the dirty clothes accumulate in the corners and it’s time to clean up.”
― Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells