Rachel Friedman > Quotes

“What happens when we lose the things that anchor us? What if, instead of grasping at something to hold on to, we pull up our roots and walk away? Instead of trying to find the way back, we walk deeper and deeper into the woods, willing ourselves to get lost. In this place where nothing is recognizable. not the people or the language or the food, we are truly on our own. Eventually, we find ourselves unencumbered by the past or the future. Here is a fleeting glimpse of our truest self, our self in the present moment.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“I imagine the people whose lives are most intertwined with mine, and I realize life has gone on without me. The planet has not imploded because I, the girl who has always done what is expected of her, decided not to, just this once.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Before, some places just seemed too far, too difficult to reach, but once you start traveling, you never want to stop. You want to hear other people's stories, see where they live, eat their food. You realize--and of course it's a cliche, but like many cliches, it's true--the way we are all interconnected.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“At this point in my travels and in my life, I still regard changing course as a personal failing. I don't yet have the hindsight to realize that some places don't fit quite right, for whatever reason, so sometimes it's best to cash in your chips and give it a go somewhere new, even if a mere twenty-four hours before you didn't even know that place existed.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Maybe this is what travel gives you—or gives you back, in most cases—that childlike sense of wonder, and with it a kidstyle openness where you want to finger-paint with anyone and everyone who shows”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“It’s exciting to fit somewhere when I have felt out of place everywhere for so long.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“...being a weatherman in Ireland is about the biggest scam going.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“I’ve found it freeing these last few months to let go of some insecurities, large and small, or at least to put them on hold. One”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“reading is such a pure thing, such blissful enjoyment, that I don’t know if I want to professionalize it and risk, as with music, losing it on some level. I”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Backpacking has noble ideals: to see how the locals live, to interact with them, to be respectful and blend in as much as possible. Backpackers want to learn, we want to understand the worlds we have entered, not simply consume them.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“More and more, quicker and quicker, the places I travel draw me in like a spell. I”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Who you are when you are tested might not be pretty, but it's always real.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“It takes grit to persevere, but sometimes it also takes grit to quit, especially when you've wandered pretty far down a path--when you've tied your identity to walking that path in a world where our primary yardstick for measuring success is longevity. [...] It takes courage to quit something you've built your identity around.”
― Rachel Friedman, And Then We Grew Up: On Creativity, Potential, and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood

“Even the homes we leave on purpose, the families we break away from to be ourselves or someone else, call us back again and again, to a place that has long since ceased to be home yet still holds power over us.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“I had no idea how creative ambition and life balance could coexist, because achieving balance seemed to imply being content, and didn't contentment mean you were no longer "hungry"? And if you lost your hunger, didn't you one day wake up in the suburbs helicopter parenting a couple of kids or working at a soul sucking corporate job? You stopped making art. You stopped being passionate. You stopped being you.”
― Rachel Friedman, And Then We Grew Up: On Creativity, Potential, and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood

“That summer, maybe for the first time in my life, I existed wholly in the present moment, which is one of the liberating things about traveling to a place where no one knows you. I had no past or future, which suited me perfectly, since I did not wish to reckon with either.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Who decides the parameters of this real world, where the initiation seems like self-sacrifice? Give up your personal vision of happiness in exchange for a collective vision: work hard, get married, buy a house, have a kid or two, diversify your portfolio, retire comfortably without burdening your children, die.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“I am less prepared for things to go well than badly. Back”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“She is confident and nonchalant in equal proportion to my paralyzing self-consciousness.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“What I found on the road was a tiny piece of myself, the one I kept unknowingly shuttered for so long in order to play the many roles I thought were mine.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Whenever you’re traveling, you have these thoughts of home. At what point will you have been away so long that it will no longer be recognizable—or you won’t be?”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Heed this warning: four and a half hours in Surfers Paradise is four hours too long.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Even with the coffee, I’m never fully awake, just jittery.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“One day she left because the pain of staying would not retreat.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Being a stranger was invigorating. Maybe I am a traveler.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“I like backpacker me. She is easygoing. She talks less, listens more. She doesn’t wear a watch. She doesn’t have anyone to answer to because she is far, far away. She is freer than ever.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“The geographies of our childhoods don’t quite suit either of us, something we have in common.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“I struggled with a romantic notion I had secretly nourished since I started playing music—that to be happy, we must make a career out of what we love most.”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“Writing has always been a way for me to make sense of the world, even if the most important changes happening to me abroad—many of which are imperceptible until years later—are nowhere to be found on those pages. My”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

“The House of the Spirits. I pass on the former but trade her my copy of Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good for the Allende. I don’t yet know Allende is”
― Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure