Quotes About Journey

All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.

If I got lost along the way I had a compass that I had found embedded in a pile of wet leaves I was kicking my way through. The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.

Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture.

Holding onto the naive belief that travel will open.

Closure is an illusion, the winking of the eye of a storm. Nothing is completely resolved in life, nothing is perfect. The important thing is to keep living because only by living can you see what happens next." - on Murakami's 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage' in The New York Times

The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life.

And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. I'm going to remember everything and then I'm going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That's what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands.

Our dreams are a second life.

You don't follow plots you negotiate them.

Perhaps it's not where we're going but just that we go.

Time to travel, to acquiesce to fate.

Spanish pilgrims travel on Camino de Santiago from monastery to monastery, collecting small medals to attach to their rosary as proof of their steps. I have stacks of Polaroids, each marking my own, that I sometimes spread out like tarots or baseball cards of an imagined celestial team.

The process of boarding a plane without a book produces a wave of panic. The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.

The transformation of a heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards.

I have smoothed the hem of the robe of Parsifal. Watched Giotto's sheep wander from a fresco. Prayed before holy icons unveiled, surviving time. Held shavings swept from the hut of Geppetto. Unzipped a body bag and beheld the face of my brother. Witnessed the acolyte scatter petals over a dying poet. I saw the smoke of incense form the shape of my days. I saw my love return to God. I saw things as they are.

There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light.

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined.

The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.

There were no ashtrays and no sign of my philosophic cowpoke. I sensed he had been heading this way and most likely, spotting the spanking new paint job, just kept on going. I looked around. Nothing to hold me here, either, not even the dried carcass of a dead bee.

El taxi llega tan rápido que no me da tiempo a elegir qué libros llevarme. La perspectiva de embarcar en un avión sin un libro me produce una oleada de pánico. El libro adecuado puede ser una especie de maestro, que marca el tono o incluso altera el curso de un viaje.

We are guided by roses, the scent of a page.

Taxin kommer för snabbt och jag inser att jag inte har valt ut några böcker. Tanken på att stiga ombord på ett flygplan utan bok ger mig panik. Rätt bok kan vara ett slags guide, något som sätter tonen för resan eller till och med får den att byta riktning.