longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness

I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can't find me and I can spend all day reading or walking all alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one my most favorite possible things to be.

I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all the acquisitions and accomplishments- they run you down in the end.

I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.

library is a beautiful old thing

Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.

This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.