Nowhere for Very Long Quotes

“But even the most beautiful stories can have tragic endings. They can also have beautiful endings. Though I suspect any story worth telling has a little bit of both.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“To be inside those canyon walls was to be cradled in the arms of the earth itself. I felt hidden out there. Safe. As if I could just slip away and be carried off to rest among Indian paintbrush and coyote willow. Left there undisturbed, untouched. Buried somewhere in the sand like pottery.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long

“All my life, I’d assumed it was only brave people who did brave things. I’d never once considered how many of them were absolutely terrified.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“I believe the truth of how we become who we are is layered. Not like onions, but like earth. Traceable at the surface, but tumultuous beneath. Tectonic plates of our pasts shifting violently, or more often subtly, causing great rumbling disruptions in the identities we think we’ve mapped so well.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“But it became comforting to think of fear as a vessel of freedom. I had scared myself right into the kind of life I wanted.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“Even as I stood there in the middle of the road beside that giant orange mess of metal, it all seemed so peaceful. There had been no dramatic explosion, no horrible screeching car accident, no burst of fire consuming her whole. Bertha just rolled silently to a stop one day on a completely nondescript dirt road that sliced through a sagebush field, and it was over.
That part of my live was over.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long

“As horribly cliché as it sounds, it felt for the first time that my soul had perhaps lived once before. And if it had, it most certainly lived here.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“We couldn’t run away to the desert because that’s just not what adults do. Adults pack their crazy dreams away, perhaps forever, or perhaps to push upon the next generation, who, for some unknown reason, might have a better shot at them than they did. Then they put on their ties and pay their mortgages because, at some point, someone told them their dreams were no longer feasible. And they believed them.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“Leave it to modern man to go out and decimate the natural world so they can display its remnants in their living room.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“A middle finger to the only way of life I'd ever witnessed. Grow up. Go to school. Get a job. Get married. Buy a house. Have some kids. Make a lot of money. Buy a bunch of stuff. Work constantly to afford all the stuff. And then hope you're still alive and able-bodied enough to go out and see the world.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“It’s a profitable business, the business of fear. For every terrifying scenario, there is a strategically placed antidote for sale alongside it.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“We simply traded a set of four walls for a set of four wheels on a Tuesday afternoon in September and the world spun on.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“One of my yellow detention slips from the spring semester read: Calling Jesus an asshole.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“For as long as I’d been alive, I’d listened to people talk through their teeth about all the trips they would take and the hobbies they would pick up and the books they would write and the bands they would start, only to watch those dreams get stacked away in old boxes behind record collections and dusty picture frames. I lay there on the floor that night smiling from ear to ear. I was not going to be one of those people.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“For as long as I’d been alive, I’d listened to people talk through their teeth about all the trips they would take and the hobbies they would pick up and the books they would write and the bands they would start, only to watch those dreams get stacked away in old boxes behind record collections and dusty picture frames.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“I believe the truth of how we become who we are is layered. Not like onions”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all—the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“After all, the closer you are to the masterpiece, the more you see the cracks in the paint.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“The point of music is not to get to the end, and the point of dancing is not to get to one place in the room.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“I was not the beginning of anything. I was a speck of dust blowing through. A happening among other happenings.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“I grew up—as most women do—believing that the world was inherently dangerous. These narratives were most often pushed by people who had never truly gone out to see for themselves. Why would they? They had been traumatized by the nightly news and the horror movies and the wide-eyed stories whispered from one woman to another. It’s a profitable business, the business of fear. For every terrifying scenario, there is a strategically placed antidote for sale alongside it. I spent many nights alone in the van beneath streetlights or blackened desert skies wishing that I could snap my fingers and erase all the stories I’d been told, but I couldn’t. If I was going to do these things alone, I was going to have to do them afraid. I would not let societally induced fear be a placeholder for the kind of life I wanted to live,”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“The desert is such a volatile place that I have often wondered what it is that I find so peaceful about it. Perhaps it’s the silence. Perhaps it’s the ancientness. Or perhaps it’s the sheer intention of anything bold enough to grow there, to thrive there. I wanted to be in the desert, yes, but perhaps more important, I wanted to be like the desert.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“I understood wanting; it was the sickness of wanting all that stuff so badly and so often that I might forget to go find what I needed. It was the insatiability of it all; that no amount of anything was ever going to be enough because I hadn’t found what enough truly felt like. So, I set out to prove what I didn’t need.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“But I suppose that’s what they say about parents. They usually want their children to go out and become all the things they never thought to be, do all the things they didn’t think they could.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“Most of the decisions I’ve made in my life are products of this formula, of the curiously deep-seated need to be against.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“Three years later, my mother bought a page in the back of the yearbook, as was customary for graduating seniors. On it, she put funny baby photos and well wishes, but tucked inconspicuously throughout the page were little quotes from Mark Twain about the absurdity of uniforms and the danger of blind obedience, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s famous “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” My mother’s final parting jab.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“that je ne sais quoi”—”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“But depression, addiction, and suicide were a part of our stories as well; the more unspoken, unfortunate hallmark of those who can’t help but base the value of their existence on whether or not it is seen as beautiful or worthwhile.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

“Many times I wanted to delete the app entirely, but it felt like people had bought shares in our lives. These people saved my dog's life. I felt I owed them my own in some ways.”
― Brianna Madia, Nowhere for Very Long