Jessica

“From the earliest days of the nation anyone with an intelligence equal to that of sparrows had realized that the peninsula ought logically to be united as one state, but historical accident had decreed that one portion be assigned to Maryland, whose citizens despised the Eastern Shore and considered it a backwater; one portion to the so-called state of Delaware, which never could find any reasonable justification for its existence; and the final portion to Virginia, which allowed its extreme southern fragment of the Eastern Shore to become the most pitiful orphan in America.”
― James A. Michener, Chesapeake

“If I were going uphill, I was relatively happy since I would sooner or later be going downhill. Whereas, if I were going downhill, I wasn’t all that happy because I knew I would eventually have to be going uphill.”
― George Meegan, Longest Walk: An Odyssey of the Human Spirit

“Fitness was not his cup of tea. He treated his body like a vehicle - a motorbike that he raced at top speed along the rim of the Grand Canyon.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Besides, what can be so delightful as the perpetual novelty—the exhaustless current of new ideas suggested by travelling? We read, to gather thought and knowledge; travelling is a book of the Creator’s own writing, and imparts sublimer wisdom than the printed words of man. Were I exiled perforce, I might repine, for the heart naturally yearns for home. But to adorn that home with recollections; to fly abroad from the hive, like the bee, and return laden with the sweets of travel—scenes, which haunt the eye—wild adventures, that enliven the imagination—knowledge, to enlighten and free the mind from clinging, deadening prejudices—a wider circle of sympathy with our fellow-creatures;—these are the uses of travel, for which I am convinced every one is the better and the happier.”
― Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy: Volume II, European Travel in the 19th Century