Government is an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself.
I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them.
People who thought of my journey as a physical ordeal or an act of courage. . . missed the point. Courage and physical endurance were no more than useful items of equipment for me, like facility with languages or immunity to hepatitis. The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world.
That night I lie out under the stars again. The Pleiades are there winking at me. I am no longer on my way from one place to another. I have changed lives. My life now is as black and white as night and day; a life of fierce struggle under the sun, and peaceful reflection under the night sky. I feel as though I am floating on a raft far, far away from any world I ever knew.
Nobody is free… Everyone has a prison. Wife, parents, children, they all make prisons.
It was chilling to realize that the sentimental qualities most valued between people, like loyalty, constancy, and affection, are the ones most likely to impede change.
It was going to be the journey of a lifetime, a journey that millions dream of and never make, and I wanted to do justice to all those dreams.
I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.
Because of my mother, who gave me definitions, I knew what I was committed to in life. . . . I had the most satisfactory of childhoods because Mother, small, delicate-boned, witty, and articulate, turned out to be exactly my age.
Home is where the heartache is.
The Bible tells us to be perfect. This is likely a scary thought for many people. It used to scare me. I didn't think I could ever get there, no matter how hard I tried.