The Map That Leads to You

by J.P. Monninger

“A book is a companion, though. You can read it in a special place, like on a train to Amsterdam, then you carry it home and you chuck it on a shelf, and then years later you remember that feeling you had on the train when you were young. It’s like a little island in time. If you love the book, you can give it to someone else. And you can discover it over and

over, and it’s like seeing an old friend. Can’t do that with a digital file.”

Have you ever heard someone say that books are places we visit and that when we run into people who have read the books we have read, it’s the same as if we had traveled to the same locations? We know something about them because they have lived in the same worlds we have lived. We know what they live for.”

“You can’t fence things in or out. Not really. Not for long. That’s what Checkpoint Charlie says to me.”

To understand the world, you needed to see the world.

You said life happens here and now, and it’s a fool’s bargain to let something good go now in the hope of something better at a later date.

Nothing is always. Nothing in the universe is always.

Sometimes it’s easier to ruin a thing than to guard it.

Great love inevitably carries with it great loss.

I learned that love is not static; love does not divide. What love we find in this world is coming toward us and traveling away from us simultaneously. To say we find love is a misuse of the word find. Love finds us, passes through us, continues. We cannot find it any more than we can find air or water; we cannot live without either thing any more than we can live without love. Love is essential and as common as bread. If you look for it, you will see it everywhere, and you will never be without it.