Quotes About Journey

when you rush to get to a mythical there, one day you will arrive and realize you missed all of the pleasures and mysteries along the way.

People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to "pay our dues," go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our "purpose," where now we can be happy. It doesn't work that way.

Ultimately we are the sum of our experiences and not the sum of our belongings.

I don't like the word purpose. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy. People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to "pay our dues," go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our "purpose," where now we can be happy.

We live in a world where the yellow brick road has many forks and can take us on many incredible journeys.

Don't be sad when you fail and happy when you succeed. Both are going to happen again and again at every new level.

there is always something new to learn in this surreal art of being human.

But the reality is: reinvention is life. This is the call to adventure that constantly whispers to us. Do we answer it? Do we take the call?

You are the alchemist of your life.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.

And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.

Love was a country he knew nothing about.

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.

He smiled, Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home. He played with my thumb and grinned. N'est-ce pas ? Beautiful logic, I said. You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there? He laughed. Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room.

It's a long way," John said slowly, "ain't it? It's a hard way. It's uphill all the way.

Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.

She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb—upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain.

The real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being the most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright—and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey.

The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over.