"The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"What do you want from me?" he asks.
What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him.
More."
— Melina Marchetta (Jellicoe Road)

"Any highway . . . they all take you to the same place, don't they?"
— Jodi Picoult (The Pact: A Love Story)

"Be fearless. Have the courage to take risks. Go where there are no guarantees. Get out of your comfort zone even if it means being uncomfortable. The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades bumps and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested And have the courage to accept that you’re not perfect nothing is and no one is — and that’s OK."
— Katie Couric

"Any highway . . . they all take you to the same place, don't they?"
— Jodi Picoult (Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices)

"a) he's late.
b) he's acting like an asshole and blowing me off.
c)he's gotten into a horrible car crash that's left dead.

The most likely answer is A. (We went to prom together, and the limo had to wait in his driveway for half an hour. At the end of the night, we got charged for an extra hour. He- read: his parents- paid for it, but still.)"
— Lauren Barnholdt (Two-way Street)

"If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all."
— David Livingstone

"Fairy Tales do not generally come true. If you mary a frog, he stays a frog."
— Ina Caro

"I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.


"
— Jack Kerouac

"There's more to getting to where you're going then just knowing there's a road. "
— Joan Lowery Nixon (In The Face of Danger)

"Somewhere nere Ogallala, about six hours into that majestic, maddening prairie, I realize that half an hour has passed since I've seen a vehicle in either direction.
Oh, I think, as I finally see a pair of headlights draw nigh in the eastbound lane, so this must be where the West begins."
— Lily Burana (Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America)

"Always stay on the road to success."
— Dana Young

"If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road."
— Freya Stark (East Is West)

"Whenever you leave cleared land, when you step from some place carved out, plowed, or traced by a human and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss, I think, even more than the difficulty of walking through undergrowth, that keeps people firmly fixed to paths. In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what's beneath. A white birch feeds on the pulp of an old hemlock and supports the grapevine that will slowly throttle it. In the dead wood of another tree grow fungi black as devil's hooves. Overhead the canopy, tall pines that whistle and shudder and choke off light from their own lower branches. (from "Revival Road")"
— Louise Erdrich (The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008)

"We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. "
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Keroauc

""It may be a long road with alcohol, but it will kill you in the end""
— The Cleaner

"'This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.'"
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say; Where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?"
— Cormac McCarthy

"The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us."
— Wendell Berry

"I inhale great draught of space...the east and west are mine...and the north and south are mine...I am grandeur than I thought...I did not know i held so much goodness. "
— Walt Whitman

"There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot."
— Wendell Berry (Remembering)

"Let us search the old highways."
— H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (Trilogy)

"Long road to ruin, there in your eyes
Under the cold streetlights.
No tomorrow, no dead-ends in sight!"
— Foo Fighters

"All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in greif and ashes"
— Cormac McCarthy