Moving Quotes

“And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“She took a step and didn't want to take any more, but she did.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I give you this to take with you:
Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can
begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.”
― Judith Minty, Letters to My Daughters

“When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.”
― Rodney Dangerfield

“There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.”
― Stephen King, Doctor Sleep

“Some things scratch the surface while others strike at your soul.”
― Gianna Perada

“O love, O fire! once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul through
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“She was remorseless, but she lacked method.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle

“Aunt Petunia burst into tears. Hestia Jones gave her an approving look that changed to outrage as Aunt Petunia ran forward and embraced Dudley rather than Harry.
'S-so sweet, Dudders...' she sobbed into his massive chest. 'S-such a lovely b-boy...s-saying thank you...'
'But he hadn't said thank you at all!' said Hestia indignantly. 'He only said he didn't think Harry was a waste of space!'
'Yeah, but coming from Dudley that's like "I love you.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Pain and suffering are the soil of strength and courage.”
― Lurlene McDaniel, Someone Dies, Someone Lives

“Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them.”
― Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams

“It's hard to give up the being together with someone.”
― Lois Lowry, A Summer to Die

“My, my. A body does get around.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! . . . It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Ultramarine

“People know your tragedies and they treat you like
you’re not human. Like you’re a three-headed goat. A monster from some other planet. They keep reminding you of your pain.
You see how they look at me? They’re stuck on that person I used to be. They can’t see that old life as just a moment in time that I’ve moved on from. It was a horrible life.”
― Eric Jerome Dickey, Genevieve

“There aren't any rules to running away from your problems. No checklist of things to cross off. No instructions. Eeny, meeny, pick a path and go. That's how my dad does it anyway because apparently there's no age limit to running away, either. He wakes up one day, packs the car with everything we own, and we hit the road. Watch all the pretty colors go by until he finds a town harmless enough to hide in. But his problems always find us. Sometimes quicker than others. Sometimes one month and sometimes six. There's no rule when it comes to that, either. Not about how long it takes for the problems to catch up with us. Just that they will—that much is a given. And then it's time to run again to a new town, a new home, and a new school for me.

But if there aren't any rules, I wonder why it feels the same every time. Feels like I leave behind a little bit of who I was in each house we've left empty. Scattering pieces of me in towns all over the place. A trail of crumbs dotting the map from everywhere we've left to everywhere we go. And they don't make any pictures when I connect dots. They are random like the stars littering the sky at night.”
― Brian James, Zombie Blondes

“Consider A Move

The steady time of being unknown,
in solitude, without friends,
is not a steadiness that sustains.
I hear your voice waver on the phone:

Haven't talked to anyone for days.
I drive around. I sit in parking lots.
The voice zeroes through my ear, and waits.
What should I say? There are ways

to meet people you will want to love?
I know of none. You come out stronger
having gone through this? I no longer
believe that, if I once did. Consider a move,

a change, a job, a new place to live,
someplace you'd like to be. That's not it,
you say. Now time turns back. We almost touch.
Then what is? I ask. What is?”
― Michael Ryan, New and Selected Poems

“Reality isn‘t round, it‘s flat. There are edges where you can fall off and this October when I moved to Maine, I fell off one.”
― Carrie Jones, Captivate

“If you have no good drive in you, your life will not be steered through a good direction. It will miss its destined station. Passion or drive is what moves the vehicle of a fulfilled life.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“After five years I still had the impulse, every ten to twelve months, to find a new home. Spaces became too familiar, too elastic, too accommodating. Boredom and exasperation would set in. And though of course nothing really changed from one roof to another, I liked to harbor the illusion that small variations occurred within, that with each move something was being renewed.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

“If there's happiness tucked away in my tragedies, I'll find it no matter what. If the blind can find joy in music, and the deaf can discover it with colors, I will do my best to always find the sun in the darkness because my life isn't one sad ending - it's a series of endless happy beginnings.”
― Adam Silvera, More Happy Than Not

“I hear there are people who actually enjoy moving. Sounds like a disease to me - they must be unstable. Though it does have it’s poetry, I’ll allow that. When an old dwelling starts looking desolate, a mixture of regret and anxiety comes over us and we feel like we are leaving a safe harbor for the rolling sea. As for the new place, it looks on us with alien eyes, it has nothing to say to us, it is cold.”
― Jan Neruda, Prague Tales

“It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“I will always love you Drizzt Do'Urden my life was full and without regret because I knew you and was completed by you. Sleep well, my love.”
― R A Salvatore

“A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea.

You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.”
― Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom: Stories

“When I looked at him, I understood, for the first time since Jacob died, what people meant when they said someone was heartbreaking, that something could break your heart. I had always thought it mawkish, but in that moment I realized that it might have been mawkish, but it was also true.

And that, I suppose, was when I knew.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Every time we left a place, I felt the things that happened there being wiped clean, till all that was left was Ella, our fights and our talks and our winding roads. I wrote down dates and places in the corners of my books, and lost them along the way.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood