A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals.

Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.

For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.