Quotes About Wanderlust

riding freights, working as a scullion in the railroad cookshacks, stumbling, down-crashing in wino alley nights, expiring on coal piles, dropping his yellowed teeth one by one in the gutters of the West.

Whither goes thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

the reason being the enormous loneliness that differs just a shade and cut hair as you move across the Mississippi.

Although Gene was white there was something of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like Elmer Hassel, the New York dope addict, in him, but a railroad Hassel, a traveling epic Hassel, crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer, and only because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars, generally the Western stars.

I decided someday to become a Thoreau of the Mountains. To live like Jesus and Thoreau, except for women.

well, lackadaddy.

And off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over three thousand miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me.

The hobo has two watches you can't buy at Tiffany's, on one wrist the sun, on the other wrist the moon, both bands are made of sky.

We gotta go and never stop till we get there. Where we going, man? I don't know but we gotta go.

Ci sono troppe cose che mi piacciono e mi confondo e mi perdo a correre da una stella cadente all'altra fino allo sfinimento. (...) Non avevo niente da offrire a nessuno tranne la mia confusione.

I was not made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling.

Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean—an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance

My little yorkie Floyd is the ultimate buddy, and his passport has as many stamps as mine.

He had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.

All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.

I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.

It didn't matter where they went, the stars followed. A map of the universe spread out before them.

Where roads are made I lose my way. In the wide water, in the blue sky there is no line of a track. The pathway is hidden by the birds' wings, by the star-fires, by the flowers of the wayfaring seasons. And I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way.

Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.

A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation

I want to go to the mountains, I want to go to the sea, I want to go to a place where no one knows me, I want to be lost among the people who speak a language I don't understand at all.

there may be some journeys that you just never come all the way home from.

Man is a restless creature, nomadic at heart.