“Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure… For already have I suffered full much, and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war. Let this be added to the tale of those.”
“Nowadays, people resort to all kinds of activities in order to calm themselves after a stressful event: performing yoga poses in a sauna, leaping off bridges while tied to a bungee, killing imaginary zombies with imaginary weapons, and so forth. But in Miss Penelope Lumley s day, it was universally understood that there is nothing like a nice cup of tea to settle one s nerves in the aftermath of an adventure- a practice many would find well worth reviving.”
“His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky.”
“Adventures are what happens when an event is flawed, a mark of imperfection.”
“Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”
“In my fantasies, I was always caught up in heroic struggles, and I saw myself saving lives, sacrificing myself for others. I had far loftier ambitions than mere romance.”
“In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.”
“A year jammed full of adventure and misadventure, strides forward and many steps backward, another year in my topsy-turvy, Jekyll-and-Hyde existence.”
“The quest for a lost city erodes your body, damaging you beyond all reason. But it is your mind that bears the heaviest toll. Listen to the doubters, the worriers and the weak, and the vaguest hope of success evaporates.”
“There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy.”
“I know I am planning to visit a land that is not entirely foreign, only foreign to me. As an adventurer, I am on a journey that I believe will last me my whole life. A new relationship, discovery, or awareness excites me.”
“Lions born of the same mother are still lions and will kill their own for survival and dominance in the pride.”
“A scream pierced the sky, a child’s, so loud he dropped his cup, his right hand ready to reach for a weapon that wasn’t there. A survival reflex from another city, another part of the world. He tried to relax, but the scream had been real. Not like the whining wail he loathed, not even the shocked cry of a kid who’d just hurt himself. This scream had mortal fear in it. After three tours in Afghanistan, he knew the difference.”
“That was how you survived. See the world as it is. Not as you think it is. Not as you want it to be, or think it should be. Not even as it was yesterday. See it exactly as it is, right now.”
“The Icelanders are the most intelligent race on earth, because they discovered America and never told anyone.”
“Even our most misguided adventures were some of the best experiences of my life.”
“Charlie faced the other way. I don’t want to go to school today, Mom. I just want to see. I don’t know. Do the day different.”