Driving Toward Destiny Quotes

“When I was back in my room, I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the floor. I took my head in my hands and softly began to weep. I tried to determine the cause for my breakdown… (but) I came to realize that my sadness was caused by my own personal angst.
I had come to comprehend my own personal story in a more complete sense. I had a painful childhood, however privileged, and was now actively seeking for those things within myself that would break me away from the bonds of childhood and define me as a man. I was set on living my own life as my own man, not defined by the lives of my parents. And whether I succeeded or not, in the end I would die.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“I knew all these things were true. Wild Bill may have called me into coming to the place where I would experience this adventure, but Bill had crashed out, and I had pulled myself through and had come away with a sense of myself I didn’t have before.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“Beautiful women can be like dynamite,” (I said to Paul.)…
“Now, now. There’s nothing wrong with dynamite if it’s treated right,” he said. It’s the men who go around with lighted matches that cause the trouble. By that, I mean they’ve got their dicks hanging out of their trousers all the time. You can see how that can be a  problem for the ladies?”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“The course of my life had been in doubt for so long that I always had to assess my emotions. This was new. It felt real, mature, and I didn’t want to let it dissolve into juvenile memories as the others had. Damn! Kara made me feel like a man! That was what I’d been looking for!”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“What about your boyfriends?” I asked.
She shot me a look, but she said, “I admit I used sex to rebel against my mother, and I’ve had a few casual boyfriends since high school. I knew they were after my body, and I like sex, but that got me a reputation. I had never found anyone I could fall in love with except Paul McCartney. But that didn’t work out.”
That made me laugh but I was curious about her sexual adventurousness. Making the assumption, I asked her, “When did you start taking the pill?”
“I started taking it at sixteen because the doctor said that I needed to make up a hormone imbalance. My mother was not pleased, but that’s when I got my license to screw,” she said.
I laughed so hard at that that I fell off the bed. “You’re a witch,” I said.
“A sex witch,” Kara countered. “Come up here and I’ll prove it.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“Kara gave me a nudge with her foot under the table. I woke out of my reverie and looked at her, my first thought being, who is this girl, and how can she be so cool?”
“You were drifting off.”
“Oh wow. I’m sorry. I’m really bushed, I guess. The months in Berlin were intense. And then I was on the road like I never could have imagined. I was almost killed in a tunnel in Yugoslavia. Athens was crazy. The last two days have been a blur. I was almost squashed by a bus earlier today, and then I run into someone like you.”
“And who is someone like me?” Kara teased.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“As I wound my way up the mountain, the road began to perform multiple switchbacks like a snake in motion. I had to carefully maneuver through the 180-degree switchbacks at walking speed with one leg dangling off the side of the bike for balance or support, as needed. The road became steeper as it clung to the mountainside like a creeper vine. It was no more that twelve feet wide…
Higher and higher the road went, but I didn’t look over the edge until I came to a switchback where I had to stop the bike to walk it through the curve. When I stood with the bike between my legs, I saw that I was less than five feet from what had to be an eight hundred-foot drop-off. There were no guardrails.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“The ferry left on time…. The splash of the waters and the rumble of the engine kept such a steady drumbeat that these sounds accentuated the silence around me. Maybe in Crete, Rhea, Mother Earth, would define my destiny but I insisted it wasn’t going to be what my parents were like. I watched the stars drift by until I dozed off.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“I navigated a couple of sharp curves and then saw another meaningless sign in Cyrillic, so I kept going. And then I was in the entrance of a tunnel. And then I was driving in the tunnel at fifty kilometers per hour and it was pitch-black all around. I was driving blind! I couldn’t see anything ahead or on either side of me. My stunned brain processed the fact that the first thing I had to do was to stop the bike, so I slowly braked while disengaging the gearbox.
We passed the town of Katerini, where the road widened and had been improved with shoulders and guardrails along the waterside… I was just about to go to ninety kilometers per hour when we went around a curve and there, straight in front of us, was an enormous mountain with a snow cap.
Charlie yelled, “Holy shit! Look at that!”
I was awestruck. I knew it was Mt. Olympus, the tallest mountain in Greece and the home of the gods…
“Where else could the gods have lived?” I asked.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“After the city of Nis, that is a bad road,” the manager said. “There are mountains on either side which experience rockslides. The government cannot maintain it well. A river run close alongside the road, which floods in spring, but that should not trouble you now, but there are no guardrails, so you must watch carefully for potential washouts.
There are steep grades and blind curves, which are not signaled in advance… You truly take your life in your hands up there. And there is no one to come to your assistance should you need it. Now tell me, where are you going to spend the night?
“In Skopje.”
“Well, be sure to get there before nightfall. Do not drive at night. There are bandits in those mountains. They would love to get their hands on a motorcycle like yours.”
“Bandits? Really, I asked, hardly believing.
“Yes. They learned from being partisans during the war. Some never stopped being outlaws.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“It was a beautiful ride.”
“Yes, But I will go a little faster on the way back. I want to be home before dark, and more speed will remind me of my youth. Ha! Ha!”
I smiled. Speed was one of the things youth was all about. I certainly liked to speed in cars. But why? With speed, you just got from one place where you didn’t know what was going on to another where you didn’t know what was going on, only faster. What was the point? And I was always speeding. My car was just an extension of my thought process. I wanted to get from uncertain ground as fast as  possible but never could find the solid ground.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“But then I read that the reason Siddhartha  had left his teachers was that could not teach him about the Self. He had wanted to learn about the Self.
The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alive and unknown to myself, is due to one thing, one single thing – I was afraid of myself. I was fleeing from myself.
“I was afraid of myself,: I said aloud. “I am afraid of myself.”
Then I put down the book to reflect on the times in my life when I had been a follower or an observer and had never taken responsibility for standing up for being myself. I understood that my awareness of my inner fears was a step toward resolving them.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny

“Eva stroked the back of my neck with one hand and ran her other hand up and down my chest. She broke away from my tongue and kissed my lips over and under. Then she sat slightly back and looked at my face. I looked at her presence with a flush of wonder and at her face which was partially hidden by her long, auburn locks, which had fallen in from the sides. She parted her hair away from her face deftly with her hands and then leaned forward and kissed me first under my right eye and then under my left eye. It was the sexiest moment of my life.
“You should close the door,” she told me.”
― Tim Scott, Driving Toward Destiny