---- Mark Twain
My Lord God,
I have no idea where I m going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and will never leave me to face my perils alone.
--- A Prayer by Thomas Merton in Thoughts in Solitude
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness � a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of like. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
--- Jack London (White Fang)
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a super abundance of energy which found no outlet in our quite life.
--- Leo Tolstoy (Family Happiness)
It should not be denied�that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west.
--- Wallace Stegner (The American West as Living Space)
��If we can make it to Kansas City, to Hannibal and the Mississippi, I�ll walk the rest of the way. Only a thousand miles to go from there. If a man can�t walk he might as well be dead. Vachel Lindsay walked across the country. So did John Muir and Johnny Appleseed. A pickup truck is fine, a horse is better, but in the end when you come right down to it the noblest mode of locomotion is that by way of the legs, proceeding upright, erect, like a human being, not squatting on the haunches like a frog.�
--- excerpts from the book The Fool�s Progress by Edward Abbey
�Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.�
---- Aristotle
�The path of life has many crossroads, and at each one it�s difficult to say goodbye and go our own separate ways, choosing the direction that is right for each of us. But the memory of being together will always remain, and there is always the chance that our paths will cross again.�
---- Yee Donna
"How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?"
---- Bob Dylan
"I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
---- Robert Frost
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."
---- Mark Twain
"There's a feeling I get, when I look to the west, and my spirit is longing for leaving."
---- Led Zeppelin
"Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
---- Thomas Jefferson
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle."
---- Albert Einstein
