Bianca Emanuel > Bianca's Quotes

“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“Sometimes when you lose your way, you find YOURSELF.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with Confidence

“I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a 'wanderess.' Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences - whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the same to her.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“It only had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I walked and I walked, my mind shifting into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion, and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn't walk even one more step.
And then I ran.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Listen to me, your body is not a temple. Temples can be destroyed and desecrated. Your body is a forest—thick canopies of maple trees and sweet scented wildflowers sprouting in the underwood. You will grow back, over and over, no matter how badly you are devastated.”
― Beau Taplin

“She was unstoppable. Not because she did not have failures or doubts, bit because she continued on despite them.”
― Beau Taplin

“No, I do not want to be loved unconditionally. I want to be shown when I am treating you less than you deserve. I want you to leave if I ever start making you promises I do not see through. Love me for my flaws, yes, but don’t you dare ever allow them to hurt you.”
― Beau Taplin

“There’s a corner of my heart that is yours. And I don’t mean for now, or until I’ve found somebody else, I mean forever. I mean to say that whether I fall in love a thousand times over or once or never again, there’ll always be a small quiet place in my heart that belongs only to you.”
― Beau Taplin

“Hearts aren't handcuffs and people aren't prisons. When you feel it's time for you to leave, you leave. You neither need to wait to be released, nor ask for permission.”
― Beau Taplin

“She was unstoppable. not because she did not have failures or doubts. but because she continued on despite them.”
― Beau Taplin

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
― Anita Desai

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

“She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.”
― Roman Payne

“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.”
― Judith Thurman

“I read; I travel; I become”
― Derek Walcott

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“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

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
― James A. Michener