Travel Light, Move Fast Quotes

“I find luxury only encourages guests to outstay their welcome. A reptile or two keeps everyone on their toes,”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“Make a plan,” Dad always said. “And if that doesn’t work, make another one and if that doesn’t work, you’re probably the problem.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“LIKE LOVE, war’s a bloody mess when it’s happening, and a worse mess when it’s over; but with any distance, you can look back at either and see only the glory, or only the pain. The dusk-obscured truth—somewhere in the middle of all our human messiness—is very difficult to recognize. Honestly, it’s so faint through the dim pewter gloaming; it may not even be there at all, shapeless and formless. Perhaps it’s God, or time, or all things; it’s grace in any case. Some soldiers claim to have seen it through gun smoke; women pushing life into the world might catch a glimpse of it; it’s in the start of everything and in everyone’s end, surely. But to have clarity in the routine of your ordinary life, not at the very end, or in extremis: That’s amazing grace; and you don’t just wake up there either. There’s always a terrible waiting period, a purgatory of doubt, between the suffering and the grace. That’s the lonely alone work, weathering the places in between, and dismantling oneself piece by piece meantime, shredding all that can be shredded, returning to dust all that can be eroded. Amazing grace appears when all faith has fled; when final exhaustion has set in; when there’re no trails to follow and one carries on anyway.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“We belonged nowhere here; we belonged nowhere else.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“Each daughter experiences her father’s death as if she were the only daughter on Earth, and he the only father.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“among his very few belongings I found a small, green leather-bound booklet given “to Timothy Donald Fuller with the Compliments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a memento on becoming a citizen of Rhodesia at Umtali on 17th October, 1974.” Inside the pamphlet were a few of the sorts of things meant to inspire Rhodesian citizens onward and upward to greater things. A statue of Cecil John Rhodes, looking gouty; that was page 1.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“But he wasn’t removed from life, he was removed from the stories that swirl around the legs of a life, tripping it up.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“Anyone who wants to start a war should have to spend the night in the hospital with the boys who come back from it,”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“It’s handcuffs if you look at it properly, not an inheritance.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“She isn’t consumed by life, the way my father was; instead she devours it herself, she is the consumer. Sampling everything life has to offer, but deliciously, and slowly and methodically.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“What now?” Mum asked. I didn’t know what now. I knew what next, but I didn’t know what now. And I hadn’t realized until that very moment that “next” and “now” were, of course, two entirely different things. The future is easier to worry about; the present is harder to do. Also, I couldn’t imagine the present; but I could imagine the future, mostly.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“and then we’d be lost. “Temporarily surprised by our destination would be the more diplomatic way to put it,” Dad said, relishing it all.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“Son, brother, grandson, activist, friend, scholar, athlete, reader, thinker, lover, and all of this by twenty-one; oh, my prodigious boy, where are you going so fast without your mother?”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“We’d all understood ourselves in relation to this man as if our understanding of him were central to our being”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“She’s not talking to me,” I said. “She says Bindi says I am bad for her. She says she is tired of me, and of everything about me.” Vanessa”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“The problem with your father and money,” Mum had said, “one of them, is that he’s prone to get overexcited whenever he has any. He lays it on with a trowel for everyone: champagne, escargot, cigars, then we’re back to starvation rations and panic over your school fees. Not that I minded the sacrifice.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“Drinking was what you did when things were so overwhelmingly good you needed a hangover to tamp them down, or when things were so overwhelmingly bad you needed to forget.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“You can’t look anywhere without accidentally seeing the news.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“although he knew very little about American history, or pop culture, he’d fundamentally understood the place, cut to its original wound. “A bit racialist, aren’t they?” he’d observed.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“squinting thousand-yard stare of a person who has lived both in bright sunshine and among crocodiles and hippos his whole life.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“Paul Theroux, she adores his long, grumpy travelogues, his trips around Africa especially.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

“Another marathon was on; a rerun surely, there couldn’t be this many marathons going on all the time anywhere on Earth.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast