Quotes About Journey

Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming.

Don't you miss the world?" He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory.

Thank in your heart the brave soul who carries this letter away from me and on its way to you.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother's birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

the littlest streams, high on the mountain, small enough to dam with your hand, would eventually join the river, and that the river, though quick and violent, was but a drop in the eye of the great Ocean that encircles all the lands of the world, and contains every dream everyone has ever dreamed.

They look like scarecrows shipping west to be staked in some terrible garden.

It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.

Tantrums, doctor's appointments, therapies, a dozen drives to and from the specialist's office in Boise

It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him. As though this is the end point Werner has been moving toward ever since he left Zollverein.

The lost Greek tale Cloud Cuckoo Land, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd's journey to a city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E.

They always seem to be going somewhere and never doubt that it is the right place to be going.

Beneath his feet the snail kept on, feeling its way forward, dragging the house of its shell, fitting its body to the sand, to the private unlit horizons that whorled all around it.

Don't you want to be alive before you die?

For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been.

The) Gray wagtail...doesn't look like much, does he? Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire.

Ah," he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest touch of dread returning to his voice, "here we are. Home.

Todo dia, ela tira um tempo para se perder nos reinos da memória...

She clutches the sack. West, she thinks, this is all she knows, west where the sun goes down, west across the Propontis, and her mind sends up visions of the blessed island of Scheria, and of the bright oil and soft bread of Urbino, and of Aethon's city in the clouds, each paradise blurring into the last. It does exist, Aethon-the-fish told the wizard inside the whale. Otherwise what's it all been for?

Moonlight: his ropy tail, his shaggy cloven hooves. God knits him together in the womb of Beauty beside his brother and he lives for three winters and dies hundreds of miles from home and for what? Tree lies down in the reeds and fouls the air around him and Omeir wonders what the animal understands and what will happen to Moonlight's two beautiful horns and every breath sends another crack through his heart.

We leave our bodies behind in this world so that we may take flight into the next.

to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

I've flung a fly myself, he continues. I'm still learning it. I suppose we're all still learning. You learn and learn and then you die and you haven't learned half of it.

Soon there was a horizon, ironed flat as if by the load of the sky, and a sailboat toiling across it.

The only way to find something, she said, is to lose it first.