Toby Israel > Quotes

“Seek joy. Seek more questions than answers. Seek jobs, friends, lovers, homes in which or with whom you feel utterly yourself. Better yet, seek experiences that challenge you to become even more yourself — that is, to grow.
And if you should find more growth in movement, do not stop moving. And if you should find more meaning in stillness, stay still. And if at the end you still should wonder if you ever did find your calling, look back over the one inimitable path behind you, and ask your footsteps what you have learned.
Hint: The right questions lead not to answers, but to doors. We don’t find our calling, we walk it.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“We don’t know what’s coming next, but we can go to it with purpose. We can go to it dancing.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“Aimlessness isn’t purposelessness. Not to me. Aimlessness isn’t meaningless. Quite the contrary. Aimlessness isn’t absence from life, it is full-bodied presence in it. To wander aimlessly is to move through the world without the conceit that we actually know what is coming next. That is, to move through the world with grace.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“Remember: this is not a guidebook, it is a map. Wander at your whimsy.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“I don’t like guidebooks. I don’t like self-help-style “you must do this to be happy” rhetoric. I really don’t like dogmatic, authoritative injunctions of any kind telling me how to live my life. And if my intuition about you, dear reader, is at all accurate, neither do you. So, don’t take anything written here as an imperative. I will be the last person to tell you what you “should” or “must” do. You’ll figure out your own path; I have no doubt about it. Consider this an interpretive roadmap. My roadmap, drawn with the advantage of hindsight and the lessons from over ten years of experience in being a solo female traveler. I hope it may be of benefit to you.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“A vagabondess has earth and salt to balance her air. Her lifestyle is not a romantic, Instagram-filter utopia, but rather gritty and smeared with sweat. A vagabondess is not a symbol of an ideal of a life. She is alive.

A vagabondess weaves magic into the everyday and touches the profound with her toes as she wanders—aimlessly, purposefully—through her inner landscape and the outer wilderness of the modern world. She unites nostalgia for a freer past and hope for a liberated future by living squarely in the present tense. For solo female travelers, the vagabondess is an attainable objective, not a holy grail. She is within easy reach, if only we look in the right place: inside.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“Be optimistic. People and places have so much more good in them than meets the eye.

Don't listen, don't listen, don't listen—to them.

Bring your ear to rest on your chest, and listen: the whole point is to live.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“I don’t like guidebooks. I don’t like self-help-style “you must do this to be happy” rhetoric. I really don’t like dogmatic, authoritative injunctions of any kind telling me how to live my life. And if my intuition about you, dear reader, is at all accurate, neither do you.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“this book is not a map, but an existential guide to a vagabondish lifestyle and perspective. If you want to hold this feeling in your hands, you will have to dig for it yourself. There is no other way, no shortcut, no online course, no magic recipe.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“I consider stubbornness to be one of my most endearing personality traits.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“A path always makes so much more sense in retrospect.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel