Riding Toward Everywhere Quotes

“Hemingway’s great novels, which all revolve around journeys, bear ominous witness; for it can be argued that each journey is a quest for death. A Farewell to Arms details desertion to, flight with and death of the beloved; For Whom the Bell Tolls asserts the impossibility of escape even though it beautifully lengthens into fullness the last moments and days of its doomed hero. In both To Have and Have Not and Islands in the Stream, unlucky sailors of Cuban waters flee domestic loneliness to win death from the bullets of bad men. Finally, The Old Man and the Sea, whose protagonist completes an arduous circle from poverty and failure to the same, with only the skeleton of his once-in-a-lifetime fish to show for it, spells out the paradigm: It was the journey itself, with its hardships, triumphs, puzzles and unexpected joys, that made these books alive in the first place.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Thus the tragedy of Venus: Everybody wants her, and so our goddess has become prey.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“When I ride the rails, I don’t wish to go just anywhere; I demand to go Everywhere. I insist on being myself more than would please the neighbours.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Steve caught another trout the morning we left. He always let them go. I stood here wondering if I had reached Cold Mountain. Where is Cold Mountain, anyway? Isn’t it for the best if I can never be sure I’ve found it? Thoreau one last time: How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“I had expected my travels to be picaresque, teeming with wise, bizarre or menacing outlaw characters. At the very least, I had imagined that without really trying I would meet dozens of people of Pittsburgh Ed’s sterling caliber. In fact my various odysseys were haunted by absence, with only here and there a few lost voices such as Cinders’s or Ed’s singing about the way things used to be back then, as if they were crickets who had inexplicably outlived their summer.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“But do you remember what Pittsburgh Ed remarked about his own Cold Mountain? It might not look good in the dark. All kinds of critters out there. 8. In the dark, in the dark, beneath the power wires of the cricket-riddled forest, people were breaking branches.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Some of the stories assault me like angry ghosts, attacking my desire to feel whatever I feel, even my grief, since if I decline to feel it I might forget who or where I am.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Everywhere is Cold Mountain. Anywhere is not.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Whatever beauty our railroad travels bestow upon us comes partly from the frequent lovely surprises of reality itself, often from the intersection of our fantasies with our potentialities—this is nothing more than a cynical repetition of Thoreau’s infinite expectation of the dawn—and from love, hope and suchlike phenomena which may well exist entirely within the previous category”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Some distance away on that same mobile metal canvas, a second Venus’s meaty thighs gape, and beneath two doughy breasts whose nipples erupt whiskered rays as busily as volcanoes, a monumental slit presents itself, framed by painstakingly multitudinous strokes of pubic hair. The artist has even attempted to render some labial and clitoral detail. Beneath this fertility goddess the same or another hand has jocularly written: RED RIVER VALLEY. (Another name for this place of desire, no matter that it would be topographically inverted, is Cold Mountain.)”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“As for Kerouac, he had scribbled: Who wants Dos Passos’ old camera eye?—or Proust’s subtleties? Everybody wants to GO! That was certainly what I wanted. I hated my life right then.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“And in Spokane, which years after failing to catch out I revisited on a hot Sunday in my capacity of a sad citizen, was hemmed in by evergreen hills and tall old brick buildings so that I could scarcely breathe; I literally itched to get out of there; I am sure that the fact that my wife had expressed her wish for a divorce two days before had nothing to do with the fact that I kept saying to myself: I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get out of here.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Bright speed I refuse to forgo experiencing until the end, but both of its parameters are too great in comparison to myself for me to apprehend it while I feel it. Like an earthworm I need to tunnel through my memories and anticipations of it; like Wordsworth’s spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility. Hence when I ride freight trains my senses open; only later in dark slowness can I try to understand what it is that I’ve felt.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“I recognized the mountains more by memory than by sight. Suddenly I began to ask myself: Who am I? I found that I was speaking aloud. Over and over I whispered and shouted to myself: Who am I?”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“believe in the American myth that it is both admirable and even possible to devote one’s life to a private dream.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“I repeat: My Cold Mountain hides itself somewhere in America.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“have never looked down on any traveller, although I have pitied many and disliked a few; I wish them happier journeys to death than mine, for, after all, their happiness cannot diminish what belongs to me.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Every time I surrender, even necessarily, to authority which disregardingly or contemptuously violates me, so I violate myself. Every time I break an unnecessary law, doing so for my own joy and to the detriment of no other human being, so I regain myself, and become strong in the parts of me that the security man can never see.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“After the final train hop in this book I finally began to read a present from my friend Paul, the reissue of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, and found it dedicated to a certain Han Shan. Turning to page one, I read: Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon… By page fourteen, Kerouac was already going into raptures about Han Shan, who happened to dwell and write poems in a wall-less house called Cold Mountain. By page twenty-five he was off for Mount Matterhorn. Well, I’ve been there, too.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Our invisibility consisted of this: We were just two filthy men sitting in weeds and darkness. And”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Life had been as inviting as tracks leading everywhere, shining within the frame of the boxcar’s darkness I lived in. Yes, I live in a frame! How can I enter the picture itself? But as soon as I do, or not long after, it loses its magic, which is why I want to travel again. Was the magic ever there? Was I or “reality” to blame for its destruction?”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Dawn was a blinding turquoise slit (this being the doorway, seen obliquely from the wall). Thoreau advises us to reawaken, and keep ourselves awake…by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Walking alone up and down the tracks late that night, I wondered how long I must prove myself. I wanted to let go and become old, which meant, as my friend Ben said, becoming irrelevant. But that sounded sad. So I decided not to get old until my medical record was thicker than the Denver telephone book.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“and the sight of that buckskin plain made me all the more lustful to reach Cheyenne again. Or, as Kerouac expressed it: Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Travelling is a fool’s paradise, says Emerson, and I am proud to be a fool; for while the likelihood remains that starting over in Cheyenne would have been no more numinous than an afternoon as in some carwash where drivers lethargically get out of their radio-booming cars, it is our fantasies that impel us, so why not believe in Cheyenne?”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“And we flee in search of last summer or next summer, but there’s no harm in it if we know all the time that it’s only a shadow show.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“How free am I? Don’t I skulk like a rat through trainyards? Don’t I doze in boxcars with my boots on and without a sleeping bag, so that I can disappear more quickly when emergency strikes? Don’t I long for my train to move? How I love shadow-shows! Particularly beguiling is the way that freeway overpasses fill a rushing boxcar’s doorway with silhouetted diagonals. Do I love shadows because I fear the third dimension? Am I a writer and a printmaker in an effort to control my perception of the world by constricting it to my level? And aren’t all these questions, which rush through my mind and depart unanswered, nothing but shadow-shows themselves?”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“Isn’t going anywhere the same as going nowhere? I wrote, but that begs another question: Isn’t running away from everything the same as running toward everything? In which case, isn’t fear the same as happiness? Would I be riding the freight trains if I wasn’t trying to escape from something?”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“I didn’t think I could talk you out of it, my father finally said, sadly, and I wish I could have said proudly, because I was just like him. I never tried to explain to him why I ride freight trains. It seemed to me that he would only say: I guess I’ll never understand it. 21.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere

“When I steal a ride on a freight train, I honestly don’t care where it goes. What could be more ridiculous than that? Isn’t going anywhere the same as going nowhere?—What does one usually see from an open box?—Well, a long flat vista of fences, boggy fields, mountains in the distance…—In which case, why not stay in bed for the rest of my life? This would doubtless become its own adventure.”
― William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere