Quotes About Adventure

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

You, the passenger, sometimes fly with rookie pilots who are paying for the privilege of sitting in that seat.

My friend Jeffrey Deaver, successful author of The Bone Collector and many other thrillers, confessed once that his first short story, written as a child, was a Bond-inspired spy adventure (he refused to let me read it . . . afraid, maybe, that I might try to publish it as The Bond Collector).

Even the dictionary defines adventurer as "a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures," but adventuress is "a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.

Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it. Even as a child, I noticed that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz spent her entire time trying to get back home to Kansas, and Alice in Wonderland dreamed her long adventure, then woke up just in time for tea.

Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.

Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.

When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.

More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.

You can travel without traveling, and you can not travel -- yet travel. Being on the road is a state of mind.

The word 'still' has entered my life. People say to me, 'You're still traveling, you're still wearing blue jeans.

I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.

My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.

Whatever you want to do, just do it. Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.

It's time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave.

Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.

As he always said, "If I don't know what will happen tomorrow, it could be wonderful!

MY LAST HOPE IS to open up the road—literally. So far it's been overwhelmingly masculine turf. Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it.

Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.

Even graffiti above a tunnel can begin a journey that never ends.

It's time to leave - there is so much out there to do and say and listen to.

Now that being on the road was my choice, not my fate, I lost the melancholy feeling of 'everybody has a home but me'. I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of 'either/or', I discovered a whole world of 'and'.

Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there. Wherever

I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.