Quotes About Journey

We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love.

He had found his monsters, and now was the time to leave them behind.

Voyaging great distances – through forests, from island to island, across plains and into the mountains – is all about finding ourselves.

There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are.

A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.

He showed me how...See, he says he's going up through Laos, then into Burma, and then some other country, I forget, and then India and Iran and Turkey, and then Greece, and the rest is easy. That's what he said. The rest is easy, he said.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable--who we are, why we are--and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.

it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march.

Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance.

It was the burden of being alive.

If inner peace is the true objective, would I win it in exile?

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

Mais tu as raison. Dès que j'aurai un vaisseau capable de prendre le large, je trouverai, je sauverai et - s'il en est encore temps - j'épouserai la seule femme qui a, pour moi, à la fois un corps et un visage, et avec qui je n'ai pas besoin de renoncer aux miens.

What made him shift each boot from one step to the next one down, and then the other boot to the one below that, was the thought of being able to read books. He had of course seen the things many times, and had seen people peer into pages and then raise their heads knowing things they hadn't known before.

running parallel to the medieval

this Panama.

And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time ad space without you.

I meant to slip away, he said, busking it now.

I go out to the cliffs with binoculars to see whales find their way in from the southern mist and I walk here in this paddock, stubbornly, wondering at the heat each of us leaves in our wake.

Happiness is not our goal. The achievement of happiness deflects us from our true destiny which is the utter realization of self.

Go, he said; in peace. And sing with the whales.

In this crowded world, we must learn to navigate by speech, as ancient mariners taught themselves to sail across the Aegean Sea.