The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.

One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.

Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.

...who can say where a voyage starts - not the the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way?

The four horsemen of the prairie are tornado, locust, drought, and fire, and the greatest of these is fire, a rider with two faces because for everything taken, it makes a return in equal measure.

Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.

Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources.