If you have a spare moment, i encourage you to read these lines.


"how do things go when morality bottoms out at the top?"
— martin amis


"to love. to be loved. to never forget your own insignificance. to never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. to seek joy in the saddest of places. to pursue beauty to its lair. to never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. to respect strength, never power. above all, to watch. to try to understand. to never look away. and never, never to forget."
—arundhati roy


The Sahara
"perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is, `why go?' the answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude, he can't help himself. once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him. no other surroundings can provide a supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. he will go back, whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price."
—paul bowles


"you leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out into the hard, stony plain and stand a while alone. presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the french call "le bapteme de la solitude." it is a unique sensation and has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. a strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. for no one who has stayed in the sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came."
—paul bowles


"the finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment, is a dead man. to know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling…that is the core of the true religious sentiment. in this sense, and in this sense alone, i rank myself among profoundly religious men."
—albert einstein


"and that’s why i have to go back
to so many places in the future,
there to find myself
and constantly examine myself
with no witness but the moon
and then whistle with joy,
ambling over rocks and clods of earth,
with no task but to live,
with no family but the road."
—pablo neruda

Maturity
"it is like the radiance of the sun but not as bright and hurtful to the eyes. it is a sound that is pleasant and resonant but not sugar-filled. it is a kind of ease. it doesn’t demand attention. there is no longer a need to please. it is the point at which one no longer begs for another’s understanding. it is a smile that forgives all. it is one’s peacefulness, one’s remoteness toward the world of materials. it is a height that one doesn’t have to climb to achieve. it is when the shrill sound of a mountain wind gives way to a gentle moan, and the streams gather into a lake."
—anchee min


"i close my eyes and tighten up my brain
for i once read a book
in which the lovers were slain
for they knew not the words of the free state’s refrain
it said:
“i believe in the power of good
i believe in the state of love
i will fight for the right to be right
i will kill for the good of the fight for the right to be right”
i open my eyes to look around
and i see a child laying slain on the ground
as a love machine lumbers through desolation rows
plowing down man, woman
listening to its command
but not hearing any more
...not hearing any more."
—david bowie


"traveling isn’t a reward for working, it’s homework for living."
—anonymous