Douglas Westerbeke > Quotes

“There are things on this earth that only exist because you have beheld them. If you weren’t there, they would never have been.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“There was no retracing her steps. Once she had been, there was no way back. Every departure irreversible.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Scholars may study, historians may research, readers may read, but nobody knows more about today, this very day, than the person who lives it.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“The lack of words, he says, is not a lack of insight.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“The best way to survive some things, thought Aubry, was not to understand them.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Pain rewrites your future, how you think you’re going to live your life. It gives you a whole new way of looking at comfort and happiness.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“That evening, they spread out a blanket and watch the red summer sunset fade into a soft lilac glow, a sunset so exquisite they assume God is in love, too.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Impossible things in your world,” she says, “are inevitable in ours.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Strange how reality was constantly pulling its rug out from under her. But discovery lies where no one is looking.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“She is practiced at the art of leaving. No loss of composure, no tears.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Time to Aubry was the rhythm tapped out by her footsteps and the changing climate. To the people in the village below, time was measured by the daily routine, the crowing roosters, the udders of their goats, the ripening of their barley. Time was long for the young lovers who waited for night, short for the old men who’d lived past their use. It was slow in the mountain villages, fast in the bustling cities. She’d once floated down the Colorado River and time lengthened like a beard, until the rapids cut it short again. It fascinated her, this malleability. She wondered if time slowed down for deserters facing the firing squad, for sailors in a storm, then sped up again while playing croquet or reading a favorite book. Did time ever stop? Would it wait for you to catch up? Would it hurry on ahead?”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“If you can’t make your life meaningful, make it extraordinary.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“As long as she has a book to read, she's not bothered.”
― Douglas Westerbeke

“Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,” said the Rat. “And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please.” —KENNETH GRAHAME, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“And perhaps that’s the purpose of travel, to sift out the familiar from the foreign, to unearth those moments that remind us of home.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“If you can't make your life meaningful, make it extraordinary.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Sometimes there are circumstances even the strongest and most resilient cannot overcome.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Would you rather be known as the snitch who gets everyone into trouble or the one who helps others in their time of need?”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Do you see it? Sitting there in the center of that web? Away from all the hubbub, all this noise. It’s got its own little world up there. Just look at that.” His voice is a murmur in her ear. “Reaching out into its little universe, trying to figure out where it is, trying to understand who is shaking its threads.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“They say discovery lies in the places no one is looking.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“To think that she’s her own library, containing nothing but her, pleases her in the end. She thinks she makes a very good book, perhaps even a magnificent book. She can see it, even more than she can think it—her very last page being filled and the very last punctuation being put down. It’s not she who is dying. It’s the universe around her, darkening, closing up. It isn’t that her body is failing her, but that there’s nowhere left for her body to go. The world has run out of space, shrunken down to a vanishing point at the tip of her nose. “No, no. Bring her here,” says”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“How did we find this view without a map?” “You’re just walking?” “There is a beauty to this, you know.” “To starvation? To hypothermia?” “To wandering aimlessly.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Everyone all over the earth prays to God for victory over one another, no matter what side they’re on,” says one tired soldier to another. “I’m sure at some point God just shrugs and says to hell with them all.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“They’re put into a cell. Maybe they have a window, maybe they don’t. Travel is the three steps from one wall to the other. They may live in that cell for years, depending on the crime, depending on whether they’ve been forgotten or not. They may die in that cell. The point is, punishment is the inability to move, the inability to see the world around you. It’s a universal penalty. What you have is the opposite. You’ve seen so much of the world it must be a reward. For what, I don’t know.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“This is a world constantly moving, constantly changing. Beneath it, all that stays the same, the eternal, the code of consciousness”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“It seems,” said the woman, “that the world you travel through is not the same world we travel through.” My God, thought Aubry. My God.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“Her hands are trembling and there isn’t even pain yet. She has lost patience with her body. Tonight, she will beat it senseless. She will bring it to the edge of destruction. Her wish comes just in time. What is eternal will devour all that is temporary. What is Aubry will destroy what is disease. Then, maybe everything that has been closed will open, and she will see the world as she hopes it exists, and she will step through, and her bones will tell her, We did not know it could be so beautiful.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“She sometimes had a thought that the same way this boat bore her across the sea, she was the vessel her disease rode around the world. It clung to her back, fingers and toes screwed into her bones, gasping and grinning at all the places she went, a happy demon mounted forever on her shoulders. The thought made her feel used and angry. But everywhere she went, every new sight she saw, she could feel her sickness there, huddling in some dark corner of her mind, clinging to her skull and smiling.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World

“She thought him a kind and decent man from the moment she met him. But he’s lost everything he had, sacrificed everything he owned, lives outside convention, defies the easy path in favor of the righteous one. He does it wisely and he does it quietly. He has no parents to praise him and no children to admire him. He simply conducts himself hidden in society’s peripheral vision where no one knows to look.”
― Douglas Westerbeke

“Scholars may Study. Historians may research. Readers may read. But nobody knows more about today, this very day, than the person that lives it.”
― Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through a Wide World