#trave

The people of North America have little idea of religion, but they have strict public morality. The Latin people are without morality but they are highly religious. ↗

— Patrick Marnham

#religion

Imagine you are Siri Keeton: You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath. Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire. ↗

— Peter Watts

#science-fiction #space-travel #vampires #imagination

That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#travel

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#foreign lands #lands #only #traveler #who

I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem. ↗

— Diana Gabaldon

#historical-fiction #romance #scotland #time-travel #time

Not all those who wander are lost. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#journey #lost #quest #travel #wander

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#travel

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination. ↗

— Marion Zimmer Bradley

#hope #travel

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#goodbye #travel #travel

there was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. they were her home when she was somewhere strange. they were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#travel