Anna

“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever. That surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, stays with me. So when I feel like quitting, I ask myself, which would I rather live with?”
― Lance Armstrong, It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

“because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars...”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’
I sat up a fraction. ‘What?’
‘Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’
‘I don’t know, the lab report’s not back yet,’ I replied drily.
‘I’m serious, is that dog shit?’
‘How should I know?’
Katz leaned far enough forward to give it a good look and a cautious sniff. ‘It is dog shit,’ he announced with an odd tone of satisfaction.
‘Well, keep quiet about it or everybody’ll want some.’
‘Go and clean it off, will ya? It’s making me nauseous.’
And here the bickering started, in intense little whispers.
‘You go and clean it off.’
‘It’s your shoes.’
‘Well, I kind of like it. Besides, it kills the smell of this guy next to me.’
‘Well, it’s making me nauseous.’
‘Well, I don’t give a shit.’
‘Well, I think you’re a fuck-head.’
‘Oh, you do, do you?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact. You’ve been a fuck-head since Austria.’
‘Well, you’ve been a fuck-head since birth.’
‘Me?’ A wounded look. ‘That’s rich. You were a fuck-head in the womb, Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe