Travel Quotes

‘There’s no place like home… There’s no place like home ‘, and while I don’t have to keep repeating it like Dorothy did in the Wizard of Oz.. I know that the lines are true…nonetheless here are some travel quotes that I’ve found interesting, some even ring true…. …

"Travel is the realm of the improbable adventure, the quick fix, the ship passing in the night. It entitles you to meet interesting people, whom you would never meet, even if you laid traps or advertised for them. Not only do you meet them, but also unmeet them, all in the space of, it often seems, a mere compacted evening. As there is so little time, bodies in motion drop their guard and immediatly get on with their stories. Then the proverbial ships part, each to its destination, never again to brush each other's wake."
- Lawrence Millman, "Last Places”

". . . I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart."
- Colette

"Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating."
- Michael Crichton


"Internal burning . . . wandering fever . . ."
- Kalevala

"If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."
- Henry Miller


"Eat dessert first
Life is uncertain"
- Anonymous

". . .life is short and the world is wide"
- Simon Raven

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. . . In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable."
- John Steinbeck

"Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.'"
- Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world."
- Freya Stark


"Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent."
- Margot Fonteyn

"A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."
- George Moore 1852-1933: the Brook Kerith

"All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it."
- Samuel Johnson

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost"
- J. R. R. Tolkien "Lord of the Rings"


"All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper reasons to travel - itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing there."
- Jeff Greenwald "Shopping for Buddhas"

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. "
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."
- Paul Theroux



"Muhammad says, 'Love of one's country is a part of the faith.'
But don't take that literally! Your real 'country' is where you're heading, not where you are.
Don't misread that hadith."
- Rumi

"Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest."
- The late modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe, in an introduction to her work displayed on a newly opened museum dedicated to her art in New Mexico.

"Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."
- Aldous Huxley

"Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!"
- Bob Dylan

"Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns."
- Paul Fussel

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears."
- Glenn Clark

". . .If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another."
- Paul Bowles

"A study of the Great Malady; horror of home."
- Baudelair, Journaux Intimes

"Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe."
- Anatole France

"When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in. . ."
- D. H. Lawrence

". . .the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home."
- Paul Theroux

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."
- Aldous Huxley


". . .travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."
- Miriam Beard

"I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine."
- Caskie Stinnett

"Better far off to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often again; to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become a part of life and life's recollections."
- Augustus Hare

"We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment."
- Hilaire Belloc

"When you are everywhere, you are nowhere.
When you are somewhere, you are everywhere."
- Rumi

"Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name."
- Alice Meynell

"Old men and far travelers may lie with authority."
- Anonymous

"That same preface also contains a single line that really does sum everything up: 'Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.'"
- Jeff Greenwald - Big World dispatch #20


"He gave the impression that very many cities had rubbed him smooth."
- Graham Greene

"A good traveler has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving."
- Lao Tzu

"Trust in Allah, but tie your camel."
- Old Muslim Proverb

"A good holiday is one that is spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours."
- J. B. Priestley

"There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be travelling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love."
- Cyril Connolly

"What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do -- especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."
- William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways
"The journey not the arrival matters."
- T.S. Eliot

"Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it."
- Cesare Pavese

"The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped."
- Graham Greene

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination."
- Roy M. Goodman

"Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to."
- Alan Keightley

"Every exit is an entry somewhere else."
- Tom Stoppard

"The fastest way to travel is to be there already."
- Terry Pratchett

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."
- Herman Melville

"The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think."
- Lawrence Durrell

"Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

". . .Destination is merely a byproduct of the journey."
- Eric Hansen

"Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen."
- Louis L'Amour

"What am I doing here?"
- Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
- Martin Buber

"It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places."
- Paul Theroux

"One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy."
- Sir Richard Burton

". . .I have learned that the cost of everything from a royal suite to a bottle of soda water can be halved by the simple expedient of saying it must be halved."
- Robert Byron, on bargaining in the Middle East, The Road to Oxiana, 1933

"People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home."
- Dagobert D. Runes, US writer

"We are a plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them!"
- Bilbo to Gandalf on their first meeting

"Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?"
- Peter Matthiessen

"It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be."
- Selma Lagerlof

"It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home."
- Rumi

"If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil."
- Sinclair Lewis on the toil of travel

"An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys."
- Iain Sinclair

"The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet."
- J.R.R Tolkien

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land;
it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
- G. K. Chesterton

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."
- Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

"One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind."
- Charles Dickens


"Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong."
- Vita Sackville-West

". . .the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited."
- Evelyn Waugh, on the properties of a good travel writer (speaking of Eric Newby)

"We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having disencumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burden; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself."
- Samuel Johnson, on packing for travel

"These spiritual windowshoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.
What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.
Where did you go? 'Nowhere.'
What did you have to eat? 'Nothing much.'
Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.
It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you."
- Rumi

"A year to go around the world! A whole twelve months of scenes and curious happenings in far-off foreign lands! You have thought of doing this, almost promised yourself that when you got old enough, and rich enough, and could "spare the time," you too would go around the world. Most of us get old enough; some of us get rich enough; but the time! the time! - to spare the time, to cut loose from goods and lands, from stocks and dreary desks, quit clients, patients, readers, home and friends - ay, and our enemies whom we so dearly love! Full many a promise must be broken and few the voyagers round the world."
- D.N. Richardson, "A Girdle Round the Earth", 1888

"In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as [brazilwood and pepper, which] added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity. . .[From] these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales."
- Claude Levi-Strauss on the motivation of travel


"Back home in the Wild West, time whips by with the relentless and terrible purpose of a stranglevine vine filmed in fast motion. A week, two months, ten years snap past like amnesia, a continual barrage of workdays, appointments, dinner dates and laundromats, television shows and video cassettes, parking meters, paydays and phone calls.
You can watch it from Asia. You read the newspapers, you think about your friends back home - marching along in the parade of events - and you know it's still happening. It's happening there. On the other side. Yesterdays, todays and tomorrows are tumbling after each other like Sambo and the tiger, blending into an opaque and viscous ooze. There is no such thing as now; only a continual succession of laters, whipping their tendrils around the calendar. The clutches of the vine. . .
In Nepal, the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic impassivity of house cats. Afternoons bulge with a succulent ripeness, like fat peaches. There is time enough to do everything - write a letter, eat breakfast, read the paper, visit a shrine or two, listen to the birds, bicycle downtown to change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas - and arrive home in time for lunch."
- Jeff Greenwald "Shopping for Buddhas"

"[The traveler] may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers, excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates. In a moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humored patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence. . . Traveling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance."
- Charles Darwin

"Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."
- Miriam Beard

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
- Jack Kerouac

"The autumn leaves are falling like rain,
Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
And you, you are a thousand miles away,
There are always two cups at my table"
- T'ang Dynasty

"Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the conversation."
- Elizabeth Drew

"Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The map is not the territory."
- Alfred Korzybski

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."
- Paul Theroux

"If you come to a fork in the road, take it."
- Yogi Berra

"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' exist."
- Douglas Adams, "Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul"

"He won't fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won't fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation."
- Spalding Gray

". . . people don't take trips--trips take people."
- John Steinbeck

"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."
- Susan Sontag


"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance."
- Anonymous

"Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage."
- Regina Nadelson

"I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience -- and laughter."
- Susan M. Watkins


"There is no such thing as 'the Queen's English'. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!"
- Mark Twain, on English

"Travel - to go, move or journey from one place to another."
- Anonymous



By the time we are, in our superior wisdom, decided to make a start, we discover that those who have gone fearlessly on before, have, in their blundering way, traveled a considerable distance. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don't know now, and that you will not know next year, if you wait. The William Feather Magazine.

A traveller without observation is a bird without wings. Moslih Eddin Saadi (1184-1291)

A wise traveler never despises his own country. Carlo Goldoni.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable. Clifton Fadiman.


Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
* Bertrand Russell



"It's a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal."
(Tom Waits)

"No one speaks English and everything is broken."
(Tom Waits)

"I love to travel, But hate to arrive."
(Albert Einstein)



"Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled."
(Mohammed)


"Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones."
(Anne Sophie Swetchine)


"If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel."
(Will Kommen)


"It is solved by walking."
((Algerian Proverb))

"Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God."
(Kurt Vonnegut)



How beautiful it is to do nothing and then rest afterwards. Spanish Proverb
The further one goes the less one knows- Lao-tzu (sixth century BC)

I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts. Heman Melville

It's a death trap it's a suicide rap We gotta get out while we're young `Cause tramps like us baby we were born to run -Bruce Springsteen



Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore Andre Gide

The people here are bound to think this is the best place, or they wouldn't be here, would they? William Sutcliffe

A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for." --John A. Shedd

Let your heart guide you. It whispers so listen closely. -- The Land Before Time

A guest never forgets the host who had treated him kindly. Homer

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time -Stephen Wright

Heroes take journeys confront dragons and discover the treasure of their true selves -Carol Pearson

I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth. Steve McQueen

If an ass goes travelling he will not come home a horse Thomas Fuller

It was kind of solemn drifting down the big still river laying on our backs looking up at stars and we didn't even feel like talking aloud Mark Twain

Love has given me wings so I must fly. -- A Knight's Tale

NOT I NOT ANYONE else can travel that road for you You must travel it for yourself. Walt Whitman

O public road I say back I am not afraid to leave you yet I love you you express me better than I can express myself Walt Whitman

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry but by demonstrating that all peoples cry laugh eat worry and die it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other we may even become friends. Maya Angelou

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. Charles Dudley Warner

The only journey is the one within. Rainer Maria Rilke

The universe is a big place perhaps the biggest. Kurt Vonnegut

Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel's immediate rewards the inevitable myriad new sights smells and sounds but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way -Ralph Crawshaw


We don't go anywhere. Going somewhere is for squares. We just go! -Marlon Brando The Wild One (1954)

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time T. S. Elliot
What we do in life echoes in eternity. -- Gladiator


Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.
- John Burroughs

To roam giddily, and be everywhere but at home, such freedom doth a banishment become.
- Dr. John Donne



Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.
- Thomas Jefferson


We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
- Tom Stoppard

The one before the movers show up

Okay its 2am and I have to sleep , but I have to capture this moment …. As you can see this post follows what seems to be a recurring theme this week …so at 11 pm Thursday evening I start doing what I should have done the minute I heard I got a job and had to move ; i.e. begin packing in earnest so that I would be ready for the movers who will show up 8 am Friday morning .i.e the next day !!!

I was busy returning library books, locker keys ,borrowed CD’s etc. today morning and collecting books from kind and accommodating homes ,back to my own.

My bookshelf took me a while to sort , basically stuffed my clothes into luggage , and I plan on getting up 6 am tomorrow so that I can sort out my cosmetics and jewelry ( junk jewelry!! I don’t have heap loads of gold here, but yes I hope to find my non-junk jewelry earrings and bracelet somewhere in the dresser drawers…

So the point of the exercise was to separate my stuff from the possessions of my two other flat mates and get rid of unnecessary things…I found my single glove from New Zealand.. tried it for size( it felt snug) …decided not to throw it(again!) . I found a recommendation letter a professor from undergrad in India had written while I was applying to graduate school …it was interesting to say the least .I’ve had to take recommendations from my NZ professors as well before coming to Alabama , and looking at one of the originals from India , just shows what a long journey it has been.

I saw my acceptance letter to school here, my social security application form (filled with the address of the people I was staying with when I first came.) and my tickets and boarding passes from when I first came to the US,

I did throw away a few papers ,but not much else ,which makes sense considering I’m such a packrat.

Three years worth of possessions move to Atlanta tomorrow.

Love Is....

More of the stuff stored ( and soon to be deleted ) from the previously mentioned PC...

From my desktop....

I’m cleaning up my office space in college, and deleting assignments , photos and other files from the computer I’ve used for past two years.. I found these quotes that I intended to post previously, but somehow didn’t ….

There is a dream dreaming us. -- A Kalahari Bushman, as quoted by Joseph Campbell

Did I do anything wrong today, or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?
—Arthur Dent (Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
—Douglas Adams

I had that sense of recognition . . . here was something which I had known all my life, only I didn't know it . . . . -- Ralph Vaughan Williams

The trouble with the future is that it keeps becoming the present. -- "Calvin and Hobbes"

Why be normal? -- Bumper sticker

I'd rather be reading! -- Bumper sticker

Do not think you are on the right road just because it is a well-beaten path. -- Unknown

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience. -- Woodrow Wilson

It was so cold I almost got married. -- Shelley Winters, American actress

Law of Attraction

There is no condition that you cannot modify into something more, any more than there is any painting that you can paint and not like and just paint over it again. There are many limiting thoughts in the human environment that make it feel like it is not so, as you have these incurable illnesses, or these unchangeable conditions. But we say, they are only "unchangeable" because you believe that they are --- Abraham Hicks

I totally believe this and try to follow it.. I sincerely hope you will read the following and try to incorporate it into your living….. think good thoughts ..think good thoughts ( it’s difficult to follow after watching multiple episodes of Law and Order SVU though :S) …everyone is responsible for their life and what happens to them , and you can change your life with positive attraction …it’s tough to get rid of negative thoughts and believe in the best for yourself …but hey it’s helped me for the past seven years (if not more). If you believe I have achieved (or not achieved anything so far in my life ) …attribute it to the Law of Attraction…try and incorporate the Law of Attraction in your life……

Personally I try
1)to repeat good thoughts in my head.
2)Try to pray and put my faith in God .
3)Also distance myself from negative people ,who try to put negative thoughts about me or my loved ones in my head.. ( I think this is the most important factor that’s helped me ..i.e its ok to think that you are right and think positive thoughts about your self and appear stubborn ,than agree with someone who wants you to agree with negative opinions about yourself .)

Anyway read what the experts have to say….. I have to mention ‘Conversations with God”, “The Celestine Prophecy” , “The Alchemist” ,” Ask and it is Given”and ‘The Power of Positive Imaging “ hold positions of prime importance in my bookshelf….
This isn’t random New Age Stuff….. I remembered that I forgot after watching two one hour long Larry King Specials about it a month ago …..Please read the transcript of the show when you have the time.

From About.com (there’s a shortage of ‘scholarly’ articles about this philosophy)

Understanding the Law of Attraction
-Phylameana lila Désy
You likely know someone who is a great at manifesting. You may even have felt somewhat jealous of that person because it appears they have everything, seemingly getting these things with little effort as if they were born under a lucky star. Well, it may be that they very well were born with the knowledge of manifesting already intact. I say this because I believe once we learn something in another life (Yes, I believe in past lives, parallel existences) it is not lost, and that we can choose to bring those talents with us as we move into a new life experience.

Attracting abundance is knowledge. As any other skill people have, manifesting is no different from playing the piano or flipping pancakes in the air. How good you are at it depends on how efficient you have become at performing it.
And, although some of us are better at certain skills that doesn't mean the rest of us, with practice, can't improve or even surpass the talent expressed by another. Those people who are efficient in attracting have trained their minds to focus on their desires. They have learned it so well that they often times don't even realize how they do it. Abundance comes to them naturally. They wouldn't blink an eye if someone suggested they don't deserve something, it isn't part of their reality.

Grasping a better understanding of how the "law of attraction" works is the first step in bringing abundance into your life.

Law of Attraction

We create our own reality. We attract those things in our life (money, relationships, employment) that we focus on. I wish I could tell you that it is as simple as stating an affirmation, but no affirmation is going to work if your mind/thought is negating the positive.

When we focus on "having less" then we create that experience for ourselves. When we focus on "I hate my job" then we will never notice the aspects of our employment that might be satisfying. Basically, just wanting something isn't going to bring that to us when we continue to obsess on the not having of that something. All we will experience is "not having" and will be ultimately blocking our true desires.

Better to focus on a particular object or scenario rather than on winnings or cash.

Another mistake that we make is that we tend to think of abundance in terms of how much money we have in our bank accounts. I personally think focusing on winning the lottery is a fruitless event. Focusing on winning the lottery is kind of like focusing on "not having." I say this because of some discussions I've had with those who have held this desire, They have shared what they would do with the winnings if they won. Yet, some of the things they say they would do with the money they could actually already be doing with their current incomes on a smaller scale, but they don't. Why not? Because they cling to what they perceive as their "meager savings" with the attitude that they don't have enough out of fear. Here is an example of this:

A man's mother's has a car that is need of repair. Her son says "If I won the lottery I'd buy my mother a new car." But actually, the son has the means to take her car to the mechanics and pay out $400 needed in repairs to assure that his mom has a dependable car to drive back and forth to the market. When asked why he doesn't then just go ahead and have her current care repaired, he answers,"Well gee, I only have $800 in the bank, and doing that would knock out half my savings, what happens if my car needs repairs next week or my daughter gets sick and needs to see a doctor?"

So you see, the person's true focus is on "not enough" rather than being focused on winning the lottery. When we are focused on "not enough" it won't ever matter how much money we have, it will never be enough. Suggesting that he pay for his mother's car repairs brought his fears out into the open. It would be nice if the fellow could trust that by helping his mother and paying for the repairs he would not put himself at financial risk. But for the time being, while he feels he must hold onto that fear reality, I would suggest this man focus on visualizing his mother driving safely to and from the market in comfort and without experiencing any mechanical breakdowns. This would be a positive image/thought to get that picture to become a reality. Another suggestion would be to introduce "The Law of Attraction" to his mother so she can start attracting a new car for herself among other things she might desire.

If you have any questions ..just ask : ).I'm no expert but i can try to answer...

Old School

This picture literally bought tears to my eyes…( well almost) … apart from a uniform I never wore ( my sister did)and grass on the playground …school is exactly as I remember it ,buses and all…. . This is where I spent four hours a day , six days a week, thirty six weeks a year for fourteen years ..( twelve years with pretty much the same core group of girls …).

Those girls look so small( on second glance ..there are some boys i notice..)… when I was astudent that part of school was for tenth to twelfth graders , and for the time I was there tenth to twelfth graders seemed pretty grown up :)…
I want to go HOME!!!! .For those who I know want to see more here are more Dubai pictures.

About how life isn't always a Bollywood movie:)

First Person special

I fell in love - and she flew to Australia

How was 2006 for you? For the five people in our First Person special - from a pregnant teenager to an ill-starred lover - it was the year when everything changed. The first, Carl Carter, tells how he made the greatest romantic gesture of his life
Monday January 1, 2007

Guardian

Saturday

Eight weeks ago I spent £1,000 that I don't have on a flight to Australia. It was leaving that night. I'm no jet-setter, just your average twentysomething: single, flat-sharing and overdrawn. But something amazing had happened that left me with no choice.

It started in a nightclub when a girl called Kat came up and told me I looked bored. This was true - I'd been leaning against the wall, seeking refuge from the sea of sweaty bodies and crap music. The next night we went for dinner. We fed each other dim sum, talked for hours that felt like seconds, marvelling at how much we had in common. We're both passionate about travelling. We can both quote the entire script of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, giggling like schoolchildren into our cocktails. I'll spare you the mushy stuff. Suffice to say, I'd been waiting a long time to meet somebody like Kat. Kat was lovely. Kat thought I was lovely. And Kat was returning home to Australia in three days.

For the next few days, Kat moved in. I cooked her breakfast; we ate on the balcony, hands linked over the table, our breath steamy in the cold morning air. We played Scrabble on the lounge floor, then curled up and watched rubbish DVDs in bed. I took her to Heathrow on a rainy Tuesday night and waved a mournful goodbye. Neither of us talked about whether we'd meet again; I think I was scared I might hear the words "good while it lasted". "Hey, it's just a day away," said Kat, reading my mind. I nodded, gave her a long hug goodbye, and walked away.

Life stubbornly insisted upon continuation. It was the same job, the same house, the same routine, yet Kat was everywhere. She was the discarded cocoa mugs in the sink, the long chestnut hairs still in my bed, the DVD still spinning in the player. I took the plunge and phoned her the next day. I've always hated long-distance calls, but we chatted for hours. The next evening was spent doing the same; this was becoming addictive. I lay on my bed, staring at the same photos and wishing that they weren't of a person now on the other side of the world.

And that was when the idea occurred.

The next day, a week after we first met, I was on a bus back from the travel agent, clutching my plane ticket to Sydney. The flight left in five hours. And I hadn't told Kat.

Sunday

I arrived in Sydney after a torturous 26 hours. All I could think of was how Kat would react. Had I made the right decision by turning up unannounced? There was still time to call, still time to avert disaster, but the romantic in me wouldn't allow it. What was the point in spending a grand on the greatest romantic gesture of my life, only to blow the surprise?

On the drive to Canberra, the highway pushed south for a lonely 272km, giving me plenty of time to play out the following scenario in my head. I'd told Kat she was meeting a friend of mine, who happened to be passing through Canberra with a present from me. There was, of course, no such friend, and the person standing outside David Jones department store, next to the merry-go-round, at 1pm, would be me.

After delighting her with my arrival, the rough plan was to go for a drink, check myself into a hotel for the first night, then ... at this point the plan ended abruptly, as did the highway.

I made my way nervously to Canberra town centre 45 minutes early, and paced around, obsessing over my opening words. I settled on a casual, but jovial, "You're right, it is only a day away!" delivered from behind her back, to be replaced with a large grin when she turned around. Time passed in an odd, juddering way. At 1.02pm I was still pacing. And suddenly there she was. Standing with her back to me, peering around looking for my friend, every bit as beautiful as I remembered.

When she turned and saw me, I forgot everything. Her mouth dropped open and I blurted an odd, weak greeting, as if all this was perfectly normal. We had the briefest of clinches, then she said, "My mum and sister are here." This was very bad news.

She led me to a nearby bench, where a middle-aged woman sat with another in her 20s. "Mum, Hilary," explained Kat (and I could hear in her voice how freaked out she was), "this isn't Carl's friend. This is Carl." They smiled politely. I realised, with fleeting disappointment, that they hadn't been fully briefed. "We were just off to get some lunch," Kat said, and the four of us began walking.

This was not going to plan. All I wanted to do was fling my arms around her and tell her I really missed her, but, instead, I was being forced to assume the role of a placid freak who'd travelled the globe on a whim to "hang out" with a mate. Kat, left to assume whatever she liked, was looking increasingly alarmed. We had a light lunch in a cafe that played out like a Pinter scene with everybody discussing the price of milk and nobody daring to broach the topic of what this Englishman was doing at their table. The trickiest part came when her mother asked, "So, how did you and Kat meet?"

Mercifully, we were eventually left on our own and I drove us to a nearby park where we walked around, hands stuffed in pockets. I tried to put my arms around Kat, but it felt awkward and staged, like an over-eager date trying to cop a feel in the cinema. I sat on a bench and took a deep breath. Time to talk. I began with a stuttered apology for turning up out of the blue, a faltering explanation that I'd not meant it to be this scary.

"I don't know what to say," said Kat, after a pause that felt like eternity. "It was an amazing thing to do. It's just ... I don't know if things can be the same as they were in London. I've only just got home after two years abroad. I only just saw my mother again. I only just came out of a long relationship."

These statements rained down on me like meaty hailstones. I felt sick inside. It began to dawn on me how naive I'd been to assume we could carry on where we had left off. Kat took some of it back, sensing my disappointment and reassuring me that she was glad I was there. But then how could anyone reject me outright after I'd come 10,000 miles? What I had done was such an over-bloated gesture that any attempt at honesty would seem inappropriate. "I'm sorry it couldn't be how you planned," she said. "I think I just need a little time to adjust." I drove to a pokey motel on the other side of town, and sat in silence on the edge of the bed. Kat had half-heartedly invited me into the family home, but I declined; I felt I'd intruded enough already. I turned on my phone and it began to fill with messages from friends at home, tentatively asking how it had gone. I considered my response, and began to cry. A week suddenly felt like a long time.

Monday

I met Kat again. We had breakfast in a cafe like two relatives waiting for bad news in a hospital. After eating, we drove to Lake Burley Griffin and sat on a picnic mat, knees touching our foreheads, a metre-wide chasm between us. I asked myself: what have I done wrong? I'm still the same person she'd met in London.

Finally, I could bear it no longer and declared I was going home. Kat looked surprised, and for the first time I saw a flicker of something behind the gloom. "I really do want you here," she said, "but to be honest - what were you expecting?" The question caught me off-guard. "What you've done is incredible," she said. "Nobody's ever done anything like that for me before. But what the hell were you thinking, you idiot?" I smirked at this absurdity. Kat laughed, too. The tension was finally broken and we hugged tightly for what seemed like for ever.

I postponed my escape, accepting instead an invitation to lunch with the family and then, unexpectedly, things began to look up. The Englishman was a hit. Sitting at a pavement cafe, I shared jokes with the sisters and swapped stories with mum. I saw Kat looking proudly at me and hoped it was a good sign. We spent the afternoon and evening shopping together, but once again it became difficult, alternating between comfortable conversation and strained silences. I tried to play it cool, but I was trapped between Kat's need for an easy life and my own need for reassurance. The tension was driving me mad. Eventually, I came up with a plan. I'd head off to Sydney for a couple of days, give her some time, and return for the weekend. Maybe my second visit would feel more normal than the first.

Tuesday

We grabbed some lunch at a pavement cafe before my sojourn to Sydney. Confident of my plan, I felt less pressure, and conversation flowed easily. As I was talking, I noticed Kat looking at me in a funny way. Then, without warning, she leant forward, put a hand on my shoulder and kissed me, tenderly and warmly, on the lips. As soon as I relaxed and stopped pressuring her, it all seemed to work.

Finally, I was feeling the moment again, and Kat seemed to be, too. I kissed her a long goodbye until the weekend and drove off. I saw her face wrinkle into that cute smile as it receded in my rear-view mirror to a blur, a white dot and then nothing.

And that's the last time I saw her.

After two days in Sydney, I called, eager to make plans for the weekend, but got a shock. Kat sounded evasive. There would be family staying. We might not get time together. It might not be worth my while. I was about to launch into a persuasive counter-argument when something made me stop. And in that instant, everything became clear. There I was, miles from home, having emptied my wallet and bared my soul. If this was to continue, I would need a hell of a lot more back than I was getting. I swallowed hard, then told Kat I agreed. It wasn't worth my while. Maybe some other time. We'd stay in touch. With a heavy heart, I hung up, dialled the airline, and travelled home that same night.

Today

I'm back in London, wrapped in a woollen jumper, gazing out over the bleak winter skyline. It's two months since I stood in that manky nightclub and Kat walked over to alter the course of my life. I've recovered from the journey, but I haven't spoken to her since. She never did call, despite her promises. I still think about her a lot, but my friends are their usual brilliant, supportive selves. There's only been one embarrassing moment when I cried in their kitchen but I maintain that it was the tequila fumes.

In many ways, I've learned a lot. I don't regret going to Australia. If things had worked out, I'd be writing a very different, very smug story. Conversely, if I hadn't gone, I'd regret never knowing. I've always been an impatient romantic, and I now see that it's a selfish combination. I fall for people quickly and then make unreasonable demands on them to have similarly strong feelings back.

My journey has definitely changed me. Strangely, I feel more confident. It may not have worked out this time, but at least I am prepared to go to such lengths to answer life's questions. Would I do it again? Possibly. When you're loved-up, you make spontaneous decisions. But at what point does a big gesture cross the line from romantic to foolish?

Maddeningly, I still don't know. It scares me that one person can make me behave so irrationally and lay my heart open to such massive damage. But the world needs some craziness, otherwise it would be a very dull, predictable place. Maybe I'll just limit myself to European flights next time.

Happy New Year

“Another fresh new year is here . . .
Another year to live!
To banish worry, doubt, and fear,
To love and laugh and give!

This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest . . .
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!

I have the opportunity
Once more to right some wrongs,
To pray for peace, to plant a tree,
And sing more joyful songs!”
William Arthur Ward


“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.”
Oprah Winfrey

“New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights”
Hamilton Wright Mabie


“Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“We meet today
To thank Thee for the era done,
And Thee for the opening one”
John Greenleaf Whittier

“New year, same goal.”
Joe King

What’s in a Name?. . . . . . . . . . . . .Complete Speaker’s Almanac, p. 22
"Here we are in a month named after the Roman god Janus, an appropriate personification of the start of the new year. This particular Roman god had two faces so that he could look ahead toward the future and back at the past at the same time. As we get rid of an old year and look forward to a new one, we all try to be a little like Janus. We know through experience what we did wrong and what we did right, and hope to do better this year. Some people make ambitious new year’s resolutions; others just take a deep breath and hope for the best.…"


"A Morning Wish". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W.R. Hunt
"The sun is just rising on the morning of another day, the first day of the new year. What can I wish that this day, that this year, may bring to me?
Nothing that shall make the world of others poorer, nothing at the expense of others; but just those few things which in their coming do not stop with me but touch me rather, as they pass and gather strength:
• A few friends who understand me, and yet remain my friends.
• A work to do which has real value without which the world would feel the poorer.
• A return for such work small enough not to tax unduly anyone who pays.
• A mind unafraid to travel, even though the trail be not blazed.
• An understanding heart.
• A sight of the eternal hills and unbelting sea, and of something beautiful the individual hand has made.
• A sense of humor and the power to laugh.
• A little leisure with nothing to do.
• A few moments of quiet, silent meditation. The sense of the presence of God.
• And the patience to wait for the coming of these things, with the wisdom to know them when they come."
Guide words: An Anthology of Inspiration and Humor, p. 13


Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. - Thomas Mann


Harry Burns: I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
-When Harry met Sally

I do think New Year's resolutions can't technically be expected to begin on New Year's Day, don't you? Since, because it's an extension of New Year's Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system. Also dieting on New Year's Day isn't a good idea as you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second. ~Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary

Going through a Quarter -Life crisis ...check back in two decades...

Ok so now I totally understand this ….. I realize that I’m not strange to be feeling this ..and there are enough messed up people out there for a technical term to be created about this situation ( well not technical term exactly…) don’t I always say that 25 is the new 15 ?!?!? So here goes …I seem to have been going through and am currently in the throes of a quarter life crisis …. From the wiki

The quarterlife crisis is a term applied to the period of life immediately following the major changes of adolescence, usually ranging from the ages of 21 - 29. The term is named by analogy with mid-life crisis. It is now recognised by many therapists and professionals in the mental health field. The phenomenon has been identified in Japan as 'freeter'. Abby Wilner coined the phrase in 1997 and co-authored the first book to identify this phenomenon: Quarterlife Crisis, the Unique Challenges of Life in your Twenties (Tarcher, 2001).

Some parts of the wiki that relate to my condition are :

The version of the "quarter-life crisis" proposed by Erikson, then, is very different from the one that occurs in popular culture. Indeed, the pop-culture version of the "quarter-life crisis" contains more elements of the crisis Erickson associated with adolescence, Identity vs. Role-confusion, giving credence to the theory that late-20th century life, with its bizarre mix of extreme comfort and insecurity, is then causing people to mature at a slower rate.

Two years.... and counting...

Today …apart from being my graduation cum getting a job treat day was the second anniversary of my arrival in the US …yipeee!!!… no really , I guess this was one of the anniversaries that deserved to be remembered….last year I was in India at this time …so in effect this is the first and most probably only anniversary I’ll spend in Tuscaloosa….

I remember two years ago I was at the airport in LA… first just assimilating the fact that I was in an AMERICAN airport ..i.e. I was in America…. I spent most of my dollars tasting Haagen Dazs ice cream for the first time in the airport lounge….I was stuck there for twenty four hours after a twenty two hour flight, because my flight to Atlanta kept getting delayed /cancelled .. Well made it to Atlanta and Birmingham and finally Tuscaloosa …( not all the way to t-town via Delta..but you understand)…And the rest as they say is HISTORY : ).

Post School Jitters

So I’ll be moving to a new place and taking up a new job…I am very excited about the whole thing , it’s been what I’ve been hoping for since the end of 2005, a good amalgam of my skill sets, and a great team to work with in a great city , in an office full of desis.( my manager has a Ganesh idol on her desk )…

I don’t know what it is though but I’m not as enthusiastic as I’d imagined… maybe the realization that a new chapter of life that I’ve put off for a while will start soon has me scared, will I be able to do the job well; will they like me etc etc…Suddenly responsibility has been thrust upon my shoulders …. Start paying off my student loans , credit card bills …uughhh…

Maybe if I were getting a six figure salary I’d be thrilled… but that isn’t it either…. You need relevant experience before you can start earning in six figures…

I’m trying to think of some not so obvious positive things …. Living alone in a city in a high rise and not on student income.. That’s been my dream for so long!!! So I should be excited…….

Maybe I’ll terribly miss Tuscaloosa?!?! Or maybe my experience with moving to new places has left me a little bit cynical… or maybe the fact that ‘The Day’ has come has finally dawned on me .. ‘The day’ from the time I joined graduate school three years ago ; was a kind of a milestone that I had to accomplish before I could do anything worthwhile ..so now that I’ve crossed the milestone it remains that I have to make good on my word and start doing all those things ‘I would do after I get a job…’ . Maybe I realize that even though it seems like time stands still while you’re at school … it really doesn’t ..people are growing older , just because you embrace work life but try to cling on to whatever remnants of independent student living you can doesn’t mean that others around you would stop from wanting to embrace non independent responsibility ( do you understand what I’m trying to get at ???)

… Anyway it feels that I’ve been in this safe little capsule my entire life ( being a student that is ) ,and now have been sent out to this environment where the biggest problem isn’t completing an assignment or passing an exam …. Where people want to get married to their boyfriends or crushes and have babies and pay taxes and buy houses and cook and pay higher rents and buy cars and save for retirement and….* phew* the list is endless… I don’t particularly like school … but I guess it was a good enough shield from real life….


So you realize this post is not about my job but more about how after twenty years of school I have to finally enter the real world…. So dear blog I open up to you this ambiguousness I’m feeling, because I can’t make sense of it myself ..( some consolation for me is that I do remember that I was always a bit non excited before all of my previous journeys…).

TV Song Lyrics- '06

Two memorable sets of lyrics from the Winter of ‘06

First... Chasing Cars… introduced to me via Grey’s Anatomy

Snow Patrol Chasing Cars Lyrics

We'll do it all
Everything
On our own

We don't need
Anything
Or anyone

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel

Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's burstin’ into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads

I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

All that I am
All that I ever was
It’s here in your perfect eyes
They're all I can see

I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things
Will never change for us at all

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Waiting on the World to Change via Brothers and Sisters

John Mayer- Waiting On The World To Change

me and all my friends
we're all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothing and
there's no way we ever could
now we see everything that's going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don't have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

it's hard to beat the system
when we're standing at a distance
so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
now if we had the power
to bring our neighbors home from war
they would have never missed a Christmas
no more ribbons on their door
and when you trust your television


what you get is what you got
cause when they own the information, oh
they can bend it all they want

that's why we're waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

it's not that we don't care,
we just know that the fight ain't fair
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

and we're still waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting waiting on the world to change
one day our generation
is gonna rule the population
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

Great songs…and I’ve watched a LOT of TV this past year…………

Me but not wholly me....

I do not know how other authors feel about their writings but always I have a strange sensation when I read something that I had written some time previously. That sensation is heightened when the writing had been done in the close and abnormal atmosphere of prison and the subsequent reading had taken place outside. I recognize it of course , but not wholly , it seems almost that I was reading some familiar piece written by another , who was near to me and yet who was different . Perhaps that is the measure of the change that has taken place in me.

So I have felt about this book also. It is mine and not wholly mine ,as I am constituted today; it represents rather some past self of mine which has already joined that long succession of other selves that existed for a while and faded away , leaving only a memory behind.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Preface of the book ‘The Discovery of India’

Not that I've ever lived in an environment close to being in prison ...but I was thinking about the same thing , it's kind of “the end of an era” point for me right now… every year ,for the past few years, around this time I embark on a ‘big’ journey ..last year it was my India trip after two years , the year before it was from Wellington to Tuscaloosa and prior to that ,Udipi to Wellington…. This time around the shift isn’t going to be as drastic as I imagined ( at some point of time I thought my options consisted of either Mississippi or Southern California :) ) …

Anyway a few days ago I chanced upon my student id card from 2004 … it was from my NZ college and the photograph was from three months before my arrival in NZ , when I was still in India.I realized that I had changed fundamentally from the girl in the picture …now I think …

Would she like me ?? If I had to use one word it would probably be ‘No’, just because I truly believe I was a better person then.. ( I wonder about the series of events that led from that to this..) …

Would she appreciate where I was at this present moment ???? Maybe yes , it’s definitely not what she wanted, but it’s beyond her wildest dreams(at that point…she has had wilder dreams before and after that time period ) ….

I wonder what will happen in the future..When I read these blog entries and see my (then) old id cards... how will I answer those questions?

Personally I feel they serve as good self improvement tools and reality checks :)

On a side note.... I've decided that one characteristic to figure out if I can truly get along with a person is when a phone conversation isn't a chore...

For the traveller.....

A passage from "The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran

A friend gave me the book before I left Wellington, the following passage resonated deeply then , and I guess it isn't surprising that I chance upon it once more....

"Almastafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn unto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalase for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth. And in the twelfth year on the seventh day of Lelool, the month of reaping, he climbed a hill without the city walls and looked seaward; and he beheld his ship coming with the mist.

Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul. But, as he ascended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:

"How shall I go in peace without sorrow? Nay, not without a word in the spirit shall I leave this city. Long were the days of pain I have spent within it's walls., and long were the nites of aloneness; And who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and to many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache. It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands. Nor is it a thought that I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst. Yes, I cannot tarry any longer. The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark. For to stay, the hours burn in the nite, is to freeze and to crystalize and be bound in a mold. Fain that I would take with me all that is here. But how shall I?

A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether. And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the Sun".

*********************************************************************************

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas :)

Seasons Greetings!!!

Does any one else miss Greeting Cards ( the paper variety…. I mean)

Neil Gaiman quotes

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”


“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”

“But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize. Their hearts desire, their dream....But the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted.”

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten”

“Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?”

Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close in”

“This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.”

“It was a dark and stormy nightmare”

“I'll come to you tonight, dear, when it's late,
You will not see me; you may feel a chill.
I'll wait until you sleep, then take my fill,
And that will be your future on a plate.
They'll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate.”

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange

"-People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes."

Comics Part 3

with due respect to the copyright owners...

A life less ordinary..

....In a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, this reality is summed up succinctly. In the story, we read the words of an Indian who had come to Boston as a young man on the day the Americans first landed on the moon:

"While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly 30 years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."



"If it can be allowed that the passport is a kind of book, then the immigration officer, holding a passport in his hand, is also a reader. Like someone in a library or even, in the course of a pleasant afternoon, on a bench beneath a tree. Under the fluorescent lights, he reads the entries made in an unfamiliar hand under categories that are all too familiar. He examines the seals, the stamps, and the signatures on them.
He looks up. He reads the immigrant's responses to his questions, the clothes, the accent. The officer's eyes return to the passport. He appears to be reading it more carefully. He frowns. Suddenly he turns around and tries to catch a colleague's eye. It is nothing, he wants more coffee.
You notice all this if you are an immigrant ..."

Passport Photos, Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar on English Textbooks

The Hindu, Literary Review, October 2, 2005
Textbook of Laughter and Forgetting

We have repeatedly witnessed in recent years, almost like the seasonal outbreak of a distressing form of cholera, controversies over the contents of history textbooks.
But why is there no discussion about what school-children are asked to read in their English textbooks?


I have very little memory now of what I had read in the books used in my history classes, although I do remember the attention with which I would copy out on clean sheets of paper the line-drawings that represented the portraits of emperors. Akbar’s moustache drooped. Humayun was thin and wizened, already preparing, it seemed, for a premature death. The rounded lines in the portrait of Shah Jahan contained all the sorrow of love’s futile striving. Nearly everything else in those books escapes me at the moment.

This might be entirely because I was a mediocre student and, like the uninspired everywhere, I found my classes stultifying. But the fact remains that I still have vivid and exact memories of what I read in my English textbooks. It was there that I read George Orwell’s account of shooting an elephant in Burma, Dom Moraes on a trip to the Thar, Khushwant Singh’s depiction of life in the village of Mano Majra, Somerset Maugham describing the solitude on his seventieth birthday.

When I was sixteen, I left my hometown Patna to go to school in Delhi. The school where I got admission, Modern School on Barakhamba Road, was a prestigious enclave where the children of the rich and the powerful came each day as if they were visiting a familiar club. Our teachers, for the most part drawn from the Punjabi middle-class, could only use a puritanical and unimaginative pedagogy to prop themselves up against the display of wealth. They knew in their hearts that they were superfluous and stuck to the dull routine of making us read and repeat the words in the textbooks prescribed by the school board.

Nevertheless, the English textbooks that I read and reread during those two years gave me a sense of language and an idea of how to express my own sense of the world that I inhabited. This is what literature can do, even without your knowing it. Shouldn’t there be wider debate, then, on what our students read in their books?
I recently received a letter from an editor at Macmillan-India. He had written to say that he was preparing a textbook for the Intermediate level students in Bihar and he wanted permission to use an essay of mine in which I had written about a visit to the Khudabaksh Library in Patna.*

The letter brought back the mixed memories from my youth. In my reply to the editor, I readily granted permission. I didn't ask for any payment. It seemed to me that even one poor student reading me in Bihar would be worth a thousand readers in South Delhi or abroad.

When I remembered my own alienating classroom experiences, it gave me pleasure to think that now a reader in Bihar would be able to rediscover his or her own world in my writing. The names of places as well as the people, the sentiments shared by the writer, even the dust on the streets—all of this would be familiar to the student in towns like Ara or Motihari. How many times before had Bihari students found their lives reflected in the English textbooks prescribed for their courses?
Then, just last week, the postman brought a registered package from India. It was the textbook with my essay in it. I read the book quickly. The search for relevance by the education council had meant not only the inclusion of Bihari writers like Tabish Khair among the contributors but also pieces that provided urgent social critique. A good example was a poem "Voice of the Unwanted Girl" by Sujata Bhatt, written in the voice of a destroyed foetus, presenting a protest against female infanticide. Textbooks elsewhere in India should include writings like this that touch the heart and challenge the mind.

Our students need to be freed from the claustrophobia of the classroom. The prose and poetry that we offer them should appear to them fresh and enlivening. The Macmillian-India book began with a brilliant, hopeful piece by Jawaharlal Nehru, its elegant rhetoric paying homage to the arrival of Gandhi. I felt my senses lift while reading the essay. However, I'd like to see students also reading well-written critical pieces on subjects as seemingly trivial as Bombay films. Let's give them Ashis Nandy's incisive essay on P.C. Barua and Devdas. It will engage—and educate—students as much if not more than Shakespeare and Blake.

Why is it that English textbooks, including the one I was sent, are top-heavy with hagiographies of our national leaders? I have rarely seen letters printed in these books. There is very little travel-writing. There is no space ever for quality journalism. In general, we should also be publishing more women writers. To my students in America, I have taught Mahasweta Devi, Ismat Chughtai, Urvashi Butalia, and Arundhati Roy. Why are these writers not being taught in the places where I studied in India?

In the textbook that sparked these reflections, I found a story by O. Henry called "After Twenty Years." I had read this story in my English class twenty years ago. The lines of dialogue and the characteristic, surprising O. Henry twist at the end of the story came flooding back as I turned the pages. But this experience also made me distrust my pleasure and my nostalgia. Why are textbooks so remarkably unchanged even after decades?

The most disturbing aspect of the controversies over the history textbooks has been the extent to which current political interests determined what was taught in the classroom. That was detrimental, no doubt, but in the matter of English textbooks the opposite has been true. Our textbooks have remained for the most part trapped in the bubble of their own past. They continue to be hodge-podge collections of quaint pieces, somewhat suspect in their usefulness, a bit like the clay-objects strewn beside a corpse in a ceremonial grave. It is no surprise that in our professional use of the English language, as a people, we remain stiff, formal, awkward. Unless these textbooks are radically changed, our teachers will remain mummy-makers, wrapping cotton around our children's mouths.

The Unknown Errors of Our Lives

"The Unknown Errors of Our Lives"
-Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
………. It would have been the worst error of her life, and she wouldn't even have known it. It saddens her to think of all the errors people make (she has been musing over such things lately)--the unknown errors of their lives, the ones they can never put down in a book and are therefore doomed to repeat………

Another quote compilation.... WooHooo!!!

It’s been a while since I posted some quotes …. Long one..hope you find some you like .

"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house."
- George Carlin

A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
- Stephen Crane

When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
- Woody Allen

I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world... perhaps you've seen it?


I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
- Kahlil Gibran

Better keep yourself clear and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
- George Bernard Shaw

I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
- Etienne de Grellet

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars."
- Vasily Rozanov

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
- Helen Keller

"Do you know a cure for me?"
"Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water."
"Salt water?" I asked him.
"Yes," he said, "In one form or another; sweat, tears or the salt sea."
- Isak Dinesen


KAHLIL GIBRAN
Seven times have I despised my soul:
The first time when I saw her being meek
that she might attain height.
The second time when I saw her
limping before the crippled.
The third time when she was given to choose
between the hard and the easy, and she chose the easy.
The fourth time when she committed a wrong,
and comforted herself that others, also commit wrong.
The fifth time when she forbore for weakness,
and attributed her patience to strength.
The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face,
and knew not that it was one of her own masks.
And the seventh time when she sang a song of praise,
and deemed it a virtue

ON THE STEPS OF THE TEMPLE

Yester-eve, on the marble steps of the Temple, I saw a woman sitting
between two men. One side of her face was pale, the other was
blushing.

FACES

I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that
was but a single countenance as if held in a mould.

I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness
beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful
it was.

I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face
in which all things were graven.

I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves,
and behold the reality beneath.

"THE PERFECT WORLD"

God of lost souls, thou who are lost amongst the gods, hear me:

Gentle Destiny that watchest over us, mad, wandering spirits, hear
me:

I dwell in the midst of a perfect race, I the most imperfect.

I, a human chaos, a nebula of confused elements, I move amongst
finished worlds--peoples of complete laws and pure order, whose
thoughts are assorted, whose dreams are arranged, and whose visions
are enrolled and registered.

Their virtues, O God, are measured, their sins are weighed, and
even the countless things that pass in the dim twilight of neither
sin nor virtue are recorded and catalogued.

Here days and night are divided into seasons of conduct and governed
by rules of blameless accuracy.

To eat, to drink, to sleep, to cover one's nudity, and then to be
weary in due time.

To work, to play, to sing, to dance, and then to lie still when
the clock strikes the hour.

To think thus, to feel thus much, and then to cease thinking and
feeling when a certain star rises above yonder horizon.

To rob a neighbour with a smile, to bestow gifts with a graceful
wave of the hand, to praise prudently, to blame cautiously, to
destroy a sound with a word, to burn a body with a breath, and then
to wash the hands when the day's work is done.

To love according to an established order, to entertain one's best
self in a preconceived manner, to worship the gods becomingly,
to intrigue the devils artfully--and then to forget all as though
memory were dead.

To fancy with a motive, to contemplate with consideration, to be
happy sweetly, to suffer nobly--and then to empty the cup so that
tomorrow may fill it again.

All these things, O God, are conceived with forethought, born with
determination, nursed with exactness, governed by rules, directed
by reason, and then slain and buried after a prescribed method.
And even their silent graves that lie within the human soul are
marked and numbered.

It is a perfect world, a world of consummate excellence, a world of
supreme wonders, the ripest fruit in God's garden, the master-thought
of the universe.

But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled
passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a
bewildered fragment from a burnt planet?

Why am I here, O God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods?



If you want to feel rich, just count all of the things you have that money can't buy.
- Anon

The edge of the world does not look far away, to that I am on my way running.
- Papago Indian song for a young girl

"All of the people I could be, they got fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to only one — and that's who I am. The weather man."
- David in "The Weatherman"

I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.
- Marcus Cole , "Babylon 5 "

"Who am I? I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all that I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am everything that happens after I've gone that would not have happened if I had not come.... to understand me you must swallow a world."
- Salman Rushdie, "Midnight's Children"

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
- Saul Bellow

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
- Oscar Wilde, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H."

Two often mentioned motivations for travels are to see another world and to disappear. In that sense, a journey in the footsteps of someone who disappeared in search of another world was the perfect journey.
- Nicholas Jubber, "The Prester Quest"

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
- Margaret Mead

"The people you care about you never really say goodbye to."
- MTV's "The Real World"

Basically, I have this theory that there are five kinds of truth. There is the truth you tell to casual strangers and acquaintances. There is the truth you tell to your general circle of friends and family members. There is the truth you tell to only one or two people in your entire life. There is the truth you tell to yourself. And finally, there is the truth that you do not admit even to yourself.
- JMS's Theory Of The Five Truths

Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.
- Horace Walpole

Those of you who think that you know everything are particularly annoying to those of us who do.
- Anon

Once I dreamed I was a butterful, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang Tzu, who dreamed I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterful dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu.
- Chuang Tzu


The trouble with being a young female is that you have to sound like Hermione Grainger in the classroom and look like Beyonce on a night out. This standard of perfection is so excessiev that it's taking a terrible toll.
- Medb Ruane, "The Irish Independent"

I’ve never liked the Valentine’s Day holiday. Our culture celebrates romantic love morning, noon, and night 364 days a year – and then sets aside one special day every February to really rub the lovelesses’ noses in it. Not so nice. So: if you are lucky enough to have a sweetheart, of course you must kiss her (or him) today. But if you want to do a good deed, give a thought to the many lonely people around you: the divorced, the widowed, the unlucky – and maybe, if you have a spare dollar or two, you might want to send a small anonymous bouquet to one of them. Oh – and send it to the office, where everybody can see.
- David Frum

"Why am I always at, uh, weddings, and never actually getting married, now?"
"It's probably 'cause you're a bit scruffy. Or it could also be 'cause you haven't met the right girl."
"Ah, but you see, is that it? Maybe I have met the right girls. Maybe I meet the right girls all the time. Maybe it's me. "
- "Four Weddings & A Funeral

"I'm quite certain that to to make you happy, look after you, and keep you safe is the purpose of my life."
- Jerry Burton, second-time lucky with the girl of his dreams, "Miss Marple: The Moving Finger"

"You make me want to be a better man."
"That's maybe the best compliment of my life."
"Well maybe I overshot a little, because I was aiming at just enough to keep you from walking out. "
- Melvin Udall & Carol, "As Good As It Gets"

"Love is when you look into someone's eyes and suddenly you go all the way inside, to their soul, and you both know instantly. I always imagined I'd fall in love nursing a blind soldier who was wounded in battle. Or maybe while rescuing someone in the middle of a blizzard, seconds before the avalanche hits. I thought at least by the age of 15 I'd have a love life, but I don't even have a _like_ life."
- Angela, "My So Called Life"

"I have to believe that it works...that when two people come together they stay together. I have to take that to bed with me at night even if I'm going to bed alone. That's a McBealism."
-Ally, "Ally McBeal"

"You would be the greatest choice I would ever make."
- Andy to Nina on "Everwood"



"Look at it mathematically. If just one person hooks up with somebody who isn't their soulmate, you got a chain reaction that screws it up for everybody on the planet."
- Jonesy to David, "Buying the Cow"

"I realized at that moment, there is no such thing as the one. it's more of a mind boggling whole hell of a lot of pontential ones, and while that should be comforting, it's actually pretty terrifying. We'd all like to kick back, and wait for some magical force to show us who we should spend the rest of our lives with, but the truth is there isn't a lightning bolt that slaps you on the ass and tells you to pick this person over all others. If anything its like the rain. Rain falls all the time, sometimes you're prepared for it, sometimes you're not, and depending on where you are when it hits you either get caught in it, or you dont. In fact most of us try like hell to avoid it. You might miss the bus, you might catch the bus. Maybe you remembered your umbrella, maybe you didn't. No big signs just random torrential bursts of opportunity."
- David, "Buying the Cow"

Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always.
- Dante

Love? Pah. Overrated. Here, look, these are my three wives: Pestilence, Famine and Death. Do you think I married them for their personalities? Their personalities could shatter entire planets! Arranged marriages, every one, but they worked out. They inspired me. Knowing that they are waiting at home for me is what keeps me here -- 75 light years away.
- Londo, "Babylon 5 - The War Prayer"

And then the question dreaded by all singletons, "How's the love life?"
- Bridget, "Bridget Jones's Diary"



In her own special category, she was quite beautiful. This was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at.
- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

Sorry. I thought I recognized landmarks in your face, felt familiar contours along the bones of your hand, caught a cry that tore in flight across your voice. Forgive me for staring. Someone I knew once lived there.
- Leslie Crutchfield Tompkins

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you."
- Saul Bellow

"She's got character, she doesn't even take it out on other people when she's having a bad day."
- Rob describes Laura, "High Fidelity"