Lauren

“He was, in the end, the sort of man who causes us to ask ourselves, “What does he live for? What does he find in life? What logic compels him to keep breathing? What philosophy drives him as he wanders the earth?” But we ask in vain if we fail to look beyond the surface—if we forget that beneath each surface lurks another realm, in which a caged mind whirls alone. It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

“Moving from one room to the next I inhaled in passing that incense of an old library which is worth all the perfumes of the world.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“But Southern California, in its sprawling, edgeless blandness, was losing its baseline status in my mind. It was no longer the place by which all other places had to be measured.”
― William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“The Soviet authorities didn’t outlaw climbing completely; they just shifted it from an individual experience, which they categorized as a “relic of bourgeois alpinism,” to a collective endeavour that could be manipulated by the propaganda machine.”
― Bernadette McDonald, Freedom Climbers: The Golden Age of Polish Climbing