Walking to Listen Quotes

“Evolution takes its sweet time in its work on our collective consciousness; the lasting leap from fear to love in the human mind will be its masterpiece.”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us.”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“What was it that finally brought you out?” “I wanted to die so bad. Every morning I used to get up and say, ‘One more day closer to death.’ Then I was telling my brother, and he said, ‘Why don’t you say this instead of saying that: One more day closer to healing.’ So I started saying that. And at first it didn’t mean nothing. I was just saying it just to say it. But as it went along, it started to have a meaning.”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“You take all your footprints with you”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“Whitman, giggling madly in the night: “I am the everlaughing … it is new moon and twilight.”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“Memories have to be cared for, though, if they are to survive, and remembering is the only way to care for them. After I’d neglected them for long enough, my memories must’ve taken the hint and realized they weren’t particularly wanted.”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“It hurts for a moment. It really does. It literally hurts. Your chest starts to hurt. You get choked up. But you've moved on to where you can put it behind you. But that doesn't mean you forget. Moving on is not forgetting.”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“I think he just wanted to be seen, recognized as an integral part of the world's unfolding story, included in it, loved. I wasn't free of that same desire. Who was?”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“Sometimes Chris and James spoke to each other in Navajo, a beautiful language that also seemed impossible, at once guttural and punctuated by glottal stops, but at the same time smooth. To me, it sounded like a mix of French, Arabic, and Mandarin. I couldn’t pronounce anything right. We cruised back down”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“What once had been a love letter was now litter, and this would soon disintegrate back into the earth. I wasn’t that much different—destined to disintegrate someday. I placed the love letter back onto the grass. Didn’t seem right to keep it.”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

“I thought about how grim I felt since leaving the Navajo Nation, and I tried to imagine my perfect life. Surely it wasn't this. How could perfection include loneliness and longing, filth and exhaustion, whispers of despair? It seemed there were countless other potential versions of this life that'd be so much better. I could spend hours fantasizing about them, wondering what that perfection might look like someday, wishing it would come soon. I could spend my entire life that way wondering, wishing. It'd be so easy. It was in fact, the inevitable result of believing that perfection was anything other than what already was. 'This minute that comes to me over the past decillions," Whitman wrote, "There is no better than it and now."If I couldn't find perfection in this, then what made me think I'd be able to find it tomorrow, next month or two decades from now? Peace had to be an inner perspective, not a specific and temperamental set of external conditions. The fire cackled, lighting up Jean-Sébastien and Cristelle in hues of yellow and orange, and I realized that this was my perfect life. It had to be.”
― Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time