Dioni > Dioni's Quotes

“Liberty and love
These two I must have.
For my love I’ll sacrifice
My life.
For liberty I’ll sacrifice
My love.”
― Sandor Petofi

“I looked at the terraced hills and noticed how the people had changed the earth, taming it into dizzying staircases of rice paddies; but the Chinese looked at the people and saw how they have been shaped by the land.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
― Colette

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“The late John Gardner once said that there are only two plots in all of literature. You go on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Since women, for many years, were denied the journey, they were left with only one plot in their lives --
to await the stranger. Indeed, there is essentially no picaresque tradition among women novelists. While the latter part of the twentieth century has seen a change of tendency, women's literature from Austen to Woolf is by and large a literature about waiting, usually for love.”
― Mary Morris, The Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“There's this saying: in an all-blue world, colour doesn't exist... If something seems strange, you question it; but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison then nothing seems strange.”
― Alex Garland, The Beach

“Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.”
― Alex Garland, The Beach

“Bitter, too, to be forced to acknowledge in one's heart how little love has to do with kindness.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”
― Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

“That’s what being alive is, Thing! It’s being badly prepared for everything! Because you only get one chance, Thing!”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on...”
― Voltaire

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”
― Henry Ford

“All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re traveling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic