James (JD) Dittes

“A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings

“According to my father, the greatest happiness in life was to marry the girl you'd spent your youth reading books with in the passionate pursuit of a shared ideal.”
― Orhan Pamuk

“The traveling world is parallel to the world of those rooted to one spot; it is the other end of the telescope, so to speak. Things that are taken by most people to have solidity and permanence become relative and subject to time. The church spire, the town hall or courthouse that watches over your days and is an ever-fixed mark to the merchant or the laborer, is to the traveling man only one among many such. The cherished touchstones of your daily life are to him a set of fresh opportunities for passing adventure, a source of profit to be extracted quickly, like gold from a small mountain, before moving on to the next El Dorado.”
― Tom Piazza

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory