💬 Quotes

"A hermitage is not a place of isolation; it is a place of profound encounter with the self and the universe."

"Ultimately, your life is your own creation. Don't leave its design to anyone else."

"I was hungry for books, new ways of looking and seeing."

"Whenever I went to the white stores, I tried to act like a non-person, to be as invisible as possible."

"My hunger for books ... had to be satisfied in secret, for to read was to invite suspicion and danger."

"I wanted to write because I wanted to find out who I was, what I felt, and what I thought about the world."

"The white folks were not really people; they were a natural force, like aVictorian storm or a flash flood."

"I had the feeling that I was crossing a vast ocean, alone, and that the shores I was leaving behind were hostile and strange."

"A man who has money can buy almost anything, but he cannot buy back his youth, nor can he purchase genuine affection from those he has wronged."

"Curiosity about the forbidden is the most powerful engine of human action, driving us into corners of existence we never intended to explore."

"Society builds its highest walls around the very subjects that fascinate its members the most, creating a vast underworld of unspoken desires."

"Memory is a strange archive; it preserves the trivial details of sensual pleasure with startling clarity while letting the passage of years blur everything else."

"To observe without being observed is to possess a secret dominion over the world, a quiet power that intoxicates the lonely observer."

"In the quiet chambers of the mind, we are all criminals, harboring thoughts and recreating scenes that the light of day would instantly condemn."

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

"We are none of us infallible, not even the youngest."

"There is nothing so galling to a creature come of decent people as to accept public alms, or the equivalent of public alms, of a sudden."

"Travel is hard enough by the best helps; but aside with a donkey, it is the opinion of those who are experienced that it is the very root of toil."

"Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and winds and perfumes."

"A certain drabness of sentiment hangs over places where people have lived and died, an oppressive sense of the past."