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Rachel Peterson

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Rachel’s Quotes

“Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

50 likes

“In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counter word in English. It is the verb vascular, present participle vacilando. I does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn't greatly care whether or not her gets there, although he has direction. . . We could choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

7 likes

“But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself. He doesn’t even know about race, nor is he concerned with his sisters’ marriage. It’s quite the opposite. Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully. It would be difficult to explain to a dog the good and moral purpose of a thousand humans gathered to curse one tiny human. I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quick and vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

20 likes

“We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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“A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

tags: aging, living-well, manhood

61 likes

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