Torre DeRoche > Quotes

“Life’s most beautiful things are empty without somebody to share them with.”
― Torre DeRoche, Love with a Chance of Drowning

“His introduction throws me. The only time I can envision "Hi, I'm a surgeon" as a fitting introduction is if I were on a gurney in a stark white room and a man wielding a scalpel was standing over me. Plus, it's been a while since we've talked careers with anyone. Jobs are rarely a topic of conversation anymore--they exist in a place and time too far away to seem interesting. "What do you do?" is not a question asked to define someone, because out here we're all working the same jobs: yachties, mechanics, navigators, weather-readers, fishermen, adventure travelers, storytellers.”
― Torre DeRoche, Love with a Chance of Drowning

“If something happens on the ocean, we’ll die as two people in love who are living a remarkable adventure. That’s a good way to die.”
― Torre DeRoche, Love with a Chance of Drowning

“I kept my plan simple: leave my comfort zone, work in a foreign city, enjoy some uninhibited fun, and return home in one year.”
― Torre DeRoche, Love with a Chance of Drowning

“I think he hoped I’d do something really impressive with my life. He wanted me to be like Scully from The X-Files—you know, an FBI agent who goes around kicking paranormal ass for a living. It’s kind of hard to be a kick-ass graphic designer.”
― Torre DeRoche, Love with a Chance of Drowning

“Utterly alone out here, clothes became useless some time ago and, while I’m used to seeing his bits hanging just below the whistle on his life jacket, I’m still continually amused at the sight.”
― Torre DeRoche, Love with a Chance of Drowning

“There are so many unknows in nature, and yet we've arrogantly come to see it as an insentient provider for our needs - wood and oxygen or shade on a hot summer's day, not a civilization full of its own rich and menaingful activity. How condescending. their inner worlds are far more complex and intelligent than we recognize.”
― Torre DeRoche, The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World: Love, Loss, and Other Catastrophes—through India, Italy, and Beyond

“Alchemy is the magic that emerges when we give up needing to have certainty and instead open up to the world, so that the world can open itself up to us.

Sometimes you have to break the heart of someone you love in order to live your own truth.”
― Torre DeRoche, The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World: Love, Loss, and Other Catastrophes—through India, Italy, and Beyond

“How could I tell her that walking brings you so intimately close to the earth that the separation between you and dirt or you and rodent becomes inconsequential? Where once you saw yourself as a sueprior being, a clean and shiny thing, you start to know yourself as a mass of decomposable flesh, moving through a landscape of decomposing things, atoms through atoms, particles coming and going.”
― Torre DeRoche, The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World: Love, Loss, and Other Catastrophes—through India, Italy, and Beyond

“Check it out.” I point to the water. “The fish are getting a good feed. But I can’t figure out what they’re eating.” Ivan moves in to investigate and his face screws up. “I just flushed the toilet. They’re eating my poo!” For dinner that night, we don’t eat barbecued red snapper. In fact, shit-fed red snapper is off the menu for good.”
― Torre DeRoche, Love with a Chance of Drowning

“When I was a kid, afraid of the Boogieman, I would hide motionlessly under my bed covers for hours on end. Not much has changed since then.”
― Torre DeRoche, Love with a Chance of Drowning

“Coincidentally, the psychoanalyst had explained to me through metaphor that to have anxiety is like having a snake somewhere in the room, but you don't know where that snake is. Is it under the couch? In the cupboard? hiding in a hole in the wall? Coiled up in your boot? If you knew, you could do something productive about it, like walk away, kill it, or befriend it and call it Barry - if you're into that kind of thing. But because you don't know where it is, or even if it's there at the release that follows after you've fought or fled. That nervous energy gets trapped in the body as unresolved tension. Anxiety. And so, to find the snake in the room is better than not, because then you run, kill it, or befriend it and call it Barry. That's why it's so important to face fears: to exorcize anxiety.”
― Torre DeRoche, The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World: Love, Loss, and Other Catastrophes—through India, Italy, and Beyond