Passion for adventure is never more infectious than during the summer months. I've been thinking a lot about the U.S and how incredible it is to me that there are so many countries within a country, so many cultures, landscapes, histories, peoples. As I flew to New York and back on a recent trip to pick up my 2018 Silver IPPY (Independent Book Publishers Award) for my writing on our Northern California micro-regional Southern Sonoma County and coastal West Marin, I was more aware than ever of how much more of this beautiful country I must see.
I'm intent on finishing up the next round of my new book, a contemporary novel set in the familiar coastal surrounds of Sonoma County, the Russian River and the Emerald Triangle to the north. I won't be traveling too far from my desk and my backyard for a few months, but knowing that it's all out there, so much to explore and experience, is one of the main things that keeps me going in my work.
I hope that many of you will be taking to the road, the air and the great outdoors this summer. I found some fun and inspiring literary quotes to share along with these lovely vintage posters from Pinterest.
In the words of the 8th Century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta: "Traveling, it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller."
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
Mark Twain - The Innocents Abroad
"To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.”
Hans Christian Andersen
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
Gustave Flaubert
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
Anaiis Nin
“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
Jack Kerouac - On The Road
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
Lao Tzu
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
Terry Pratchett
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
Augustin of Hippo
“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”
Anthony Bourdain
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