Departures Quotes

“But a really good traveller? That’s someone who can cheer you up when it all goes to shit. To travel is to invite chaos into your life.”
― Anna Hart, Departures: A Guide to Letting Go, One Adventure at a Time

“This thirty-six-hour adventure was an important lesson, because in recent years the word adventure has come to mean going very far, in as inconvenient manner as possible, and punctuating the whole ordeal with photo opps like eating insects, shooting guns and clinking beer bottles with the long-suffering local sherpas. Today there's a sense that unless you have three months off work, long-haul flights and a motorbike, you aren't having a real adventure. This is a phenomenally narrow, decidedly macho and unmistakably elitist definition of an adventure. Not all of us have the funds or the time to cross the Arctic Circle with nothing but our own big-chinned selfies for company.”
― Anna Hart, Departures: A Guide to Letting Go, One Adventure at a Time

“Travel makes or breaks all sorts of relationships: familial, sexual, platonic. We were now acutely aware that we'd only spent a few hours together up until this point. But the more we got to know each other, realising that we could entertain each other in a bog for three, then four hours, the better the situation seemed.
I learned a lot about what it meant to be a good traveller that night. Yes, it's important to check train timetables and glance at details of public holidays. But a really good traveller? That's someone who can cheer you up when it all goes to shit. To travel is to invite chaos into your life. And if you're with someone who can't help you laugh when you're facing a twelve-hour journey fighting with your rucksack for space in a bog, well, you didn't pack the right stuff. I came to love and relish solo travel, but trav-elling with a carefully-chosen friend has so many advantages.
Experiences that are shit, tiresome or downright scary on your own can be magically spun into comedy gold, or a charming vignette, if you have the right co-star for this mini-melodrama.
As well as having a co-star, and a co-director, you also have an audience. And having an audience, and being accountable to someone, makes all human beings behave a little bit better. We want the camera to love us, baby.”
― Anna Hart, Departures: A Guide to Letting Go, One Adventure at a Time

“Getting over a heartbreak means replacing one set of daydreams with another, and travel presents us with a vast array of daydreams to choose from. This was my first sense of just how healing travel can be when you get it right. And how travel can simply compound misery if you get it wrong. I had got it very, very wrong... but getting it wrong taught me how to get it right.”
― Anna Hart, Departures: A Guide to Letting Go, One Adventure at a Time

“And if I'm being really honest, every trip was my attempt to fix our relationship somehow. Every trip was a failed attempt to make Sean happy, so he would treat me as if he loved me. I'd been trying and failing for years, and the constant hope - and constant failure - was wearing me down. In that flat in Surrey, with nothing to distract me from the problems in my relationship, I realised that this very hope was ruining my life, and I was through with it.”
― Anna Hart, Departures: A Guide to Letting Go, One Adventure at a Time

“New Zealand had taught me that I wanted a more outdoorsy lifestyle, ideally at the beach. In Detroit, I'd seen young people like me buying and fixing up their own homes, and I dreamed of owning my own flat, a flat that could handle a cat. The user-friendliness of a city like Glasgow had made me intolerant of London's lengthy commutes and sky-high rents, which I'd come to see as the enemy of creativity.
I was never going to be able to take a gamble, and take a few months off paid commissions to write a book (this book), while I was frantically typing away, like a muppet at a piano, to scrape together the rent each month. I will always love London, and I owe the city a lot. My career as a writer is the greatest gift I've ever been given, and London gave me my career. But the other cities I'd seen, well, they'd made me realise there was more to life than London.”
― Anna Hart, Departures: A Guide to Letting Go, One Adventure at a Time

“One fuzzy Sunday morning, dared by Gemma, I leapt into Margate's Grade II Listed tidal pool. I'd hoped for nothing more than a hangover cure; I found a life-changing habit. Every morning I'd walk along the beach to the tidal pool and swim eight lengths, and I'd leave the sea knowing that, whatever happened, everything would be okay. The sea does that to me.
The coldness of the water numbed and soothed my hot little head, rinsing away any residual stress and unnecessary worries.
The saltiness stung my nostrils, and awakened my senses, and I emerged from the water feeling reborn. And the sheer beauty of the sea, wavy horizontal lines and blueness all around me, pushed inconsequential thoughts from my mind and gave me hope again. Not the desperate, unrealised, soul-crushing hope I associated with my marriage, but a general sense that things are going to be okay after all.”
― Anna Hart, Departures: A Guide to Letting Go, One Adventure at a Time