Extreme Adventure Quotes

The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.

They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table.

Emily kept telling herself this was inevitable, that it was why she’d come to Ireland: to see what her dreams led to. But seeing the man caused goosebumps to rise up on her skin, as if she were seeing a ghost. Her extremities began to tingle, and she felt the blood draining from her face.

I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies

I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport - would never do it and don't like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it's fine.

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it.

The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.

The amount of time we give to something indicates it's importance to us.

My name is Zak Bagans. I've never believed in ghosts until I came face to face with one. So I set out on a quest to capture what I once saw onto video....With no big camera crews following us around, I am joined only by my fellow investigator Nick Groff and our equipment tech Aaron Goodwin. The three of us will travel to the some of most highly active paranormal locations, where we will spend an entire night, being locked down from dusk until dawn....Raw...Extreme...These are our Ghost Adventures.

After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

It is extremely important for you to believe in yourselves not only for what you are now but for what you have the power to become. Trust in the Lord as He leads you along. He has things for you to do that you won't know about now but that will unfold later. If you stay close to Him, You will have some great adventures. You will live in a time where instead of sometimes being fulfilled, many of them will actually be fulfilled. The Lord will unfold your future bit by bit.

Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures.

The Dimwit's Guide to the Female Mind might assist your efforts in understanding human females. But it must be pointed out that this subject can be a dangerous adventure and should be undertaken with extreme caution. After all, human males have been trying to understand their females for generations, and most of the time they come away from these encounters looking like someone stuck their tails into an electric socket.

The cycle of violence needs extreme love to break it.

if you look someone in the eye and call them a ‘fat, worthless, syphilitic puddle of badger crap’ it doesn’t mean you don’t like them. It can be – and often is – a term of endearment.

I wasn't kidding about the flying-kids part. Or the talking-dog part. Anyone who's up to speed on the Adventures of Amazing Max and Her Flying, Fun-Loving Cohorts, you can skip this next page or so. Those of you who picked up this book cold, even thought it's clearly part three of the series, well, get with the program, people! I can't take two days to get you caught up on everything! Here's the abbreviated version (which is pretty, I might add): A bunch of mad scientists (mad crazy not mad angry- though a lot of them seem to have anger-management issues, especially around me) have been playing around with recombinant life-forms, where they graft different species' DNA together.

India is beyond statement, for anything you say, the opposite is also true. It's rich and poor, spiritual and material, cruel and kind, angry but peaceful, ugly and beautiful, and smart but stupid. It's all the extremes.

context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life. I mean, lets face it:when you're eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the backgroud, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion's face, you realize that in half an hour you're proably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better

I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books.

Do not hope; instead, observe” were words that Flora, as a cynic, had found useful in the extreme. She repeated them to herself a lot.

The banal advice of writ in teachers is "write what you know," but the truth is, you don't know a place until you write it. "Write what you want to know" is more like it.

An unrivaled beauty, limited in its life. A beauty so extreme in its grace that it can’t last. It stays to enrich our lives, then drifts away in the wind. Never forgotten. Because it reminds us we must live. That life is fragile, yet in that fragility, there is strength. There is love. There is purpose. It reminds us that life is short, that our breaths are numbered and our destiny is fixed, regardless of how hard we fight. It reminds us not to waste a single second. Live hard, love harder. Chase dreams, seek adventures … capture moments. Live beautifully.

Once the telephone had been invented, it was only a matter of time before the police got in on the new technology and, first in Glasgow and then in London, the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do “paperwork” and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.

There is no halfway. You don’t, it turns out, sell out a little bit. Maybe you thought you were just going to show a little ankle – okay, maybe a little calf, too – but in the end, you’re taking on the whole front line of the Pittsburgh Steelers on a dirty shag carpet.

My suspicion is that, like me, most of you reading these pages are drawn to extremes. Moderation bores you. You seek challenges and adventures that dwell on the outer edges. The path of least resistance is not a route often traveled.

Every reading is a misreading.

It sounds like a horse,' Alice thought to herself. And an extremely small voice, close to her ear, said, 'You might make a joke on that—something about "horse" and "hoarse," you know.

at the time there were moments of extreme discomfort; but the adventure, the danger, the exhilaration of doubt and peril are in retrospect something I rather regret having lost.

We needed fish, really, but I could not speak Fish.

All books have magical properties.

I was still seeing pirates in my old way, as almost-imaginary, adventure-story people with parrots on their shoulders, rather than the kind who shoot cannons at parents.

On the flight back from Korea, somewhere between the silicone implant chicken and the latest Jennifer Lopez shitefest, I try to make sense of my Korean experience.

Earthquakes were extremely uncommon in this area. A dragon and a unicorn playing tag wasn't.

He undressed, lay down, put out the light. Two names he whispered into his pillow, the few chaste northern syllables that meant for him his true and native way of love, of longing and happiness; that meant to him life and home, meant simple and heartfelt feeling. He looked back on the years that had passed. He thought of the dreamy adventures of the senses, nerves, and mind in which he had been involved; saw himself eaten up with intellect and introspection, ravaged and paralysed by insight, half worn out by the fevers and frosts of creation, helpless and in anguish of conscience between two extremes, flung to and fro between austerity and lust; raffiné, impoverished, exhausted by frigid and artificially heightened ecstasies; erring, forsaken, martyred, and ill -- and sobbed with nostalgia and remorse.

These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn’t really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.

Oh, for God’s sake. Forty-nine is extremely young. If forty-nine is not young, that would make me old, and I am not old. I have reached the age of maturity to which all humans must particularly aspire; to dismiss this pinnacle of perfection as old age is to demean all of humankind.

Individuals reacted in any number of ways to extreme stress and, relatedly, to impending death. A non-negligible percentage of people reacted in a manner which could be summed up by, ‘Screw it, I’m going out in style!

Magnus threw the monkey a fig. The monkey took the fig. "There," said Magnus. "Let us consider the matter settled." The monkey advanced, chewing in a menacing fashion. "I rather wonder what I am doing here. I enjoy city life, you know," Magnus observed. "The glittering lights, the constant companionship, the liquid entertainment. The lack of sudden monkeys." He ignored Giuliana's advice and took a smart step back, and also threw another piece of fruit. The monkey did not take the bait this time. He coiled and rattled out a growl, and Magnus took several more steps back and into a tree. Magnus flailed on impact, was briefly grateful that nobody was watching him and expecting him to be a sophisticated warlock, and had a monkey assault launched directly to his face. He shouted, spun, and sprinted through the rain forest. He did not even think to drop the fruit. It fell one by one in a bright cascade as he ran for his life from the simian menace. He heard it in hot pursuit and fled faster, until all his fruit was gone and he ran right into Ragnor. "Have a care!" Ragnor snapped. He detailed his terrible monkey adventure twice. "But of course you should have retreated at once from the dominant male," Giuliana said. "Are you an idiot? You are extremely lucky he was distracted from ripping out your throat by the fruit. He thought you were trying to steal his females." "Pardon me, but we did not have the time to exchange that kind of personal information," Magnus said. "I could not have known! Moreover, I wish to assure both of you that I did not make any amorous advances on female monkeys." He paused and winked. "I didn't actually see any, so I never got the chance." Ragnor looked very regretful about all the choices that had led to his being in this place and especially in this company. Later he stooped and hissed, low enough so Giuliana could not hear and in a way that reminded Magnus horribly of his monkey nemesis: "Did you forget that you can do magic?" Magnus spared a moment to toss a disdainful look over his shoulder. "I am not going to ensorcel a monkey! Honestly, Ragnor. What do you take me for?

The whole concept of 'the perfect meal' is ludicrous. I knew already that the best meal in the world, the perfect meal, is very rarely the most sophisticated or expensive one....Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life.

Lastly, notice your level of enthusiasm. If you had to decide right now how enthusiastic you are about being a writer, on a scale from one to ten, where one is not at all enthusiastic, and ten is extremely enthusiastic, what is your level of enthusiasm about writing?

I'd seen more menace in a Care Bear.

You can't rest on yesterday's growth. You must be dedicated to growing today... and every day.

A man after God's own heart is... a man who yearns to please God, a man who desires to grow spiritually, a man who had a heart that obeys.

In order to fight a war (probably the most extreme form of poor communication), unfamiliarity is the preferred state of mind.

The idea of whole brain emulation - which was, in effect, the liberation from matter, from the physical world - seemed to me an extreme example of the way in which science, or the belief in scientific progress, was replacing religion as the vector of deep cultural desires and delusions.

It is well known that in exchange for visionary powers, artists often suffer with extreme sensitivity and violent changeability of temperament. A philosophical crisis, or simply boredom of inactivity, could send [Holmes] spinning into a paralysed gloom from which [I] could not retrieve him.

there is something more to be experienced by staying longer in the outdoors than just proving to the world that you can. It's something on a much more personal level: appreciating things in a different light.

One in eight Cambodians – as many as 2 million people – were killed during the Khmer Rouge’s campaign to eradicate their country’s history. One out of every 250 Cambodians is missing a limb, crippled by one of the thousands and thousands of land mines still waiting to be stepped on in the country’s roads, fields, forests, and irrigation ditches. Destabilized, bombed, invaded, forced into slave labor, murdered by the thousands, the Cambodians must have been relieved when the Vietnamese, Cambodia’s historical archenemy, invaded.

In high school, I could recognize extremes of emotion. I knew enough to run if a guy came yelling and screaming at me with a baseball bat. But a girl with a subtle expression on her face … was she smiling at me? Laughing? Quizzical and curious? I had no idea. That led to a lot of awkward interactions and years of loneliness.

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.

The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid his improvisations and his black-letter editions. Then it was that the lust of the chase would suddenly come upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning power would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that of other mortals. When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music of St. James's Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom he had set himself to hunt down.

Moreover: then, you say, science itself will teach man (though this is really a luxury in my opinion) that in fact he has neither will nor caprice, and never did have any, and that he himself is nothing but a sort of piano key or a sprig in an organ;14 and that, furthermore, there also exist in the world the laws of nature; so that whatever he does is done not at all according to his own wanting, but of itself, according to the laws of nature. Consequently, these laws of nature need only be discovered, and then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and his life will become extremely easy. Needless to say, all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar; or, better still, some well-meaning publications will appear, like the present-day encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world.

Then it hit me. Poppy, Poppymin, she was the cherry blossom. She was my cherry blossom. An unrivaled beauty, limited in its life. A beauty so extreme in its grace that it can't last. It stays to enrich our lives, then drifts away in the wind. Never forgotten. Because it reminds us we must live. That life is fragile, yet in that fragility, there is strength. There is love. There is purpose. It reminds us that life is short, that our breaths are numbered and our destiny is fixed, regardless of how hard we fight. It reminds us that life is short, that our breaths are numbered and our destiny is fixed, regardless of how hard we fight. It reminds us not to waste a single second. Live hard, love harder. Chase dreams, seek adventures … capture moments. Live beautifully.

Forty-nine is extremely young. If forty-nine is not young, that would make me old, and I am not old. I have reached the age of maturity to which all humans must particularly aspire; to dismiss this pinnacle of perfection as old age is to demean all of humankind.

PROLOGUE Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you! Destiny is certainly something people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries. If we analyse people’s attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why. In this perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don’t do. At the other extreme we find the I can do it! believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own Destiny. We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it’s because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen! The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures. Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to write this and for you to be reading it now? There are so many coincidences that had to come together that it might almost seem a whim of destiny that today we are connected by these words. One infinitesimal change in that bunch of circumstances and everything would have been quite different… All these fascinating issues are to be found in Equinox. I enjoy fantasy literature very much because of all the reality it involves. As a reader you’re relaxed, your defences down, trying to enjoy an loosely-structured adventure. This is the ideal space for you to allow yourself to be carried away to an imaginary world that, paradoxically, will leave you reflecting on real life questions that have little to do with fiction, although we may not understand them completely.

But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein’s life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly.

After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically. Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.

Libraries make strange bedfellows

Some kinds of literature demand to be treated respectfully. The obligation is on the reader to live up to them and not so much on them to entertain the reader.

The word 'romance,' according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime.

When I was in Bulgarian paratroopers – we like this plane very much,’ he said. ‘Of course, we were all wearing parachutes.

All these people talk about [Vivian Maier's] hoarding, the pack-rat way she went through life. Watching, I couldn't help but feel their reactions were at least partly about money and social status; about who has the right to ownership and what happens when people exceed the number of possessions that their circumstance and standing would ordinarily allow. I don't know about you but if I was asked to put everything I own in a small room in someone else's house, I might well look like a hoarder. Although neither extreme poverty nor wealth makes one immune to craving an excess of possessions, it's worth asking of any behaviour presented as weird or freakish whether the boundary being transgressed is class, not sanity at all.

Just believe me when I tell you that the city is beautiful – and not in the oppressive way of, say, Florence, where you’re almost afraid to leave your room because you might break something.

Shortcut.’ The word filled me with dread. When has a shortcut ever worked out as planned? The word – in a horror film at least – usually precedes disembowelment and death. A ‘shortcut’ almost never leads to good times.

Because I know, I think, how it happened. One sells one’s soul in increments, slowly, over time. First, it’s a simple travel show (‘Good for the book!’). Next thing you know, you’re getting dry-humped by an ex-wrestler on the Spice Channel. I

It has been said there is nothing appertaining to life upon the broad plain. That is hardly true. Looking down from the Sierra Blanco, one sees a pathway traced out across the desert, which winds away and is lost in the extreme distance. It is rutted with wheels and trodden down by the feet of many adventurers. Here and there there are scattered white objects which glisten in the sun, and stand out against the dull deposit of alkali. Approach, and examine them! They are bones: some large and coarse, others smaller and more delicate. The former have belonged to oxen, and the latter to men. For fifteen hundred miles one may trace this ghastly caravan route by these scattered remains of those who had fallen by the wayside .

India is beyond statement, for anything you say, the opposite is also true. It’s rich and poor, spiritual and material, cruel and kind, angry but peaceful, ugly and beautiful, and smart but stupid. It’s all the extremes. India defies understanding,

Hot, salty, crunchy, and portable, the previously awful-sounding collection of greasy delights can become a Garden of Eden of heart-clogging goodness when you’re in a drunken stupor, hungering for fried snacks. At that precise moment, nothing could taste better.

Sorrow, irritation, doubt, anxiety, or any other turbulent emotion that might otherwise keep her from sleeping, eating, or, in extreme cases, speaking coherently or getting out of bed, would disappear almost completely when she was in the act of telling a story.

Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long ago that with decent people, especially Moscow people—always slow to move and irresolute—every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies life and appears a light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed simple and amusing.

Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long ago that with decent people, especially Moscow people -- always slow to move and irresolute -- every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies life and appears a light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed simple and amusing.

My parents had sent me on this journey to have adventures - small adventures, such as dining alone and trying out new foods, and bigger adventures with elves, a boy with no shoes, water sprites, Spellbinders, and dragons. They had sent me on this journey to hear my aunts tell stories about my parents themselves - reading Faery books, stealing cinnamon, eating spicy foods, turning cartwheels in forests - a basketful of memories to comfort me. Now I soared through the air, my heart glowing golden, and a thought flung itself at me. I have never been so happy.

There was hope for peace, but there will be no peace here. Not soon. There was hope for quiet, but there will be no quiet here. Not in this generation. The foundations of the home we founded are somewhat shaky, and repeating earthquakes rattle it. So what we really have in this land is an ongoing adventure. An odyssey. The Jewish state does not resemble any other nation. What this nation has to offer is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge. The adrenaline rush of living dangerously, living lustfully, living to the extreme. If a Vesuvius-like volcano were to erupt tonight and end our Pompeii, this is what it will petrify: a living people. People that have come from death and were surrounded by death but who nevertheless put up a spectacular spectacle of life. People who danced the dance of life to the very end.

The adventures of adolescence had taught Piet Barol that he was extremely attractive to most women and to many men. He was old enough to be pragmatic about this advantage, young enough to be immodest, and experienced enough to suspect that it might be decisive in this, as in other circumstances.

He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortune on the other, who when abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprize, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or to far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries of hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing, viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied, that kings had frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty or riches. He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were so subjected to so many distempers and uneasiness, either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagancies on one hand, and by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distempers upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of vertues and all kinds of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the hand-maids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversion, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessing attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly thro’ the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labour of their hands or of the head, not sold to the life of slavery for daily bread, or harrast with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest; not enraged with the passion of envy, or secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but in easy circumstances sliding gently thro’ the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living without the bitter, feeling that they are happy and learning by every day’s experience to know it more sensibly.

Tim and Andy stood there in head-to-toe leather motocross outfits, covered in road dust, behind me in a dark corner of the hotel’s dining room. Tim has penetrating pale blue eyes with tiny pupils, and the accent of an Englishman from the north – Newcastle, or Leeds maybe. Andy is an American with blond hair and the wholesome, well-fed good looks and accent of the Midwest. Behind them, two high-performance dirt bikes leaned on kickstands in the Hang Meas’ parking lot.      Tim owns a bar/restaurant in Siemreap. Andy is his chef. Go to the end of the world and apparently there will be an American chef there waiting for you.

It never occurred to me that any of these pleasures were a reward for being a pretty good kid, any more than I needed to restructure my life just to avoid an eternity of being spit-roasted on a subterranean barbecue. If this sounds flip, smug, or disrespectful, it's not meant to be. Obviously, there is great wisdom, beauty, and relevance in millennia worth of collected theological teaching from around the world. The question I'm grappling with is: why didn't these big themes and major stick-and-carrot extremes resonate with me? I just never bought into the concept. Maybe I'm part of a small minority, but I don't think so.

PROLOGUE Equinox: Whispers of Destiny Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you. Destiny is certainly a topic people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries. If we analyze people’s attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme there are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why. In that perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don’t do. At the other extreme we find the I can do it! Believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own destiny. We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it’s because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen. The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures. Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to write this and for you to be reading it now? There are so many coincidences that had to come together that it might almost seem a whim of destiny that today we are connected by these words. One infinitesimal change in that set of circumstances and everything would have been quite different… All these fascinating ideas are to be found in Equinox. I am drawn to fantasy literature because of all the coincidences to reality. As a reader you’re relaxed, your defenses down, trusting the writer to take you on an adventure. This is the ideal space for you to allow yourself to be carried away to an imaginary world that, paradoxically, will leave you reflecting on life questions that have little to do with fiction, but I ask you that perhaps maybe they do.   Gonzalo Guma

Their chairs were huge and soft, the kind that swivel and make squelching noises whenever you shift your behind. Aunt Isabelle and I had regular, hard-backed chairs. So at first, I didn’t concentrate on what the lawyers were saying because I felt too angry about this. Why didn’t we have the soft, fun, swivelling chairs?

A sampler of England's hottest 'chefs' would include a mostly hairless young blond lad named Jamie Oliver, who is referred to as the Naked Chef. As best as I can comprehend, he's a really rich guy who pretends he scoots around on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End cold-water flat, and cooks green curry for his 'mates'. He's a TV chef, so few actually eat his food. I've never seen him naked. I believe the 'Naked' refers to his 'simple, straightforward, unadorned' food; though I gather that a great number of matronly housewives would like to believe otherwise. Every time I watch his show, I want to go back in time and bully him at school.

PJs use parachuting skills to raid into enemy territory to rescue and save lives; army rangers parachute onto the battle field to kill enemy soldiers and capture ground, while a Green Beret will infiltrate a remote, hostile area to teach the local populace how to fight and defend themselves against an enemy. Recon marines can sneak into enemy territory and learn all their secrets. SEALs are small direct-action-oriented teams that can infiltrate areas by sea air, or land to accomplish their objectives, such as capturing or destroying high value targets. Air force combat controllers call in airstrikes, help seize enemy airfields, and use their air traffic control skills to orchestrate everything from large-scale aerial invasions to small insertions of American planes and soldiers. All of these elite units consider themselves exclusive brotherhoods. Members of these outfits live at the most dangerous extreme of human experience and entrust their lives to each other. They focus on a common mission and share unique experiences of adventure and danger.

One thing about creative work is that it’s never done. In different words, every person we interviewed said that it was equally true that they had worked every minute of their careers, and that they had never worked a day in all their lives. They experienced even the most focused immersion in extremely difficult tasks as a lark, an exhilarating and playful adventure.

That embrace is one of the loneliest things I’ve ever seen, though it’s hard to tell who’s worse off: the man who can only love a hologram, a figment, or the woman who can only be loved by dressing up as someone else – someone who barely exists at all, who is travelling from the moment we first see her towards death. Never mind meat-making: this is corpse-making, objectification taken to its logical extreme.

Life in mass was sensual only, to be lived and loved in its extremity. There could be no rest-houses for revolt, no dividend of joy paid out. Its spirit was accretive, to endure as far as the senses would endure, and to use each such advance as base for further adventure, deeper privation, sharper pain. Sense could not reach back or forward. A felt emotion was a conquered emotion, an experience gone dead, which we buried by expressing it.

Like anything that is important in our lives, we don’t understand the why intellectually at first; we can’t categorize or describe it in a discrete way. We just know that it has space and power in our lives, and it feels significant. You may not understand it, but you feel its weight and importance. This is why I run, why I adventure and go out to push myself day in and day out. I am searching for connection through solitude. I connect with myself, with the spaces I explore, with the human experience and existence itself. Without the extremes I can encounter through running, these playgrounds and experiences of being outside of my comfort zone, I can’t feel truly connected or understood—by others or myself. This manner of self-exploration looks different for different people. It can happen through anything that pushes you to be better and really question your purpose here on this earth, causing you to search for the answers within yourself and through your medium.

Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diablism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity--that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

At the time, I paid no heed to the emblem above the door of a compass crossed with a square; the library had been founded by Masons. There, in the quiet shadows, I read for hours from the books that the kind librarian allowed me to take from the shelves: fairy tales, adventure stories, adaptations of classics for children, and dictionaries of symbols. One day while browsing among the shelves I ran across a yellowed volume: Les Tarots by Eteilla. All my efforts to read it were in vain. The letters looked strange and the words were incomprehensible. I began to worry that I had forgotten how to read. When I communicated my anguish to the librarian, he began to laugh. “But how could you understand it; it’s written in French, my young friend! I can’t understand it either!” Oh, how I felt drawn to those mysterious pages! I flipped through them, seeing many numbers, sums, the frequent occurrence of the word Thot, some geometric shapes . . . but what fascinated me most was a rectangle inside which a princess, wearing a three-pointed crown and seated on a throne, was caressing a lion that was resting its head on her knees. The animal had an expression of profound intelligence combined with an extreme gentleness. Such a placid creature! I liked the image so much that I committed a transgression that I still have not repented: I tore out the page and brought it home to my room. Concealed beneath a floorboard, the card “STRENGTH” became my secret treasure. In the strength of my innocence, I fell in love with the princess.

In human life and in the history of faith, I think, love has a quality of a bedrock reality we discover— adventurers, travelers, each of us, only fitfully apprehending its potential. I take some solace in the fact that I’m not alone in this intuition that the reality of evil, of injustice, of suffering notwithstanding, “at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love.” That’s how Desmond Tutu put it to me, with greater authority than mine from a life that has known extremes of human cruelty one to another.

One night, as I cooked dinner in our home on the zoo grounds, I brooded over my troubles. I didn’t want to spend the evening feeling sorry for myself, so I thought about Steve out in the back, fire-gazing. He was a very lucky man, because for Steve, fire-gazing literally meant getting to build a roaring fire and sitting beside it, to contemplate life. Suddenly I heard him come thundering up the front stairs. He burst wild-eyed into the kitchen. He’s been nailed by a snake, I thought immediately. I didn’t know what was going on. “I know what we have to do!” he said, extremely excited. He pulled me into the living room, sat me down, and took my hands in his. Looking intensely into my eyes, he said, “Babe, we’ve got to have children.” Wow, I thought, that must have been some fire. “Ok-aaay,” I said. “You don’t understand, you don’t understand!” he said, trying to catch me up to his thoughts. “Everything we’ve been working for, the zoo that we’ve been building up, all of our efforts to protect wildlife, it will all stop with us!” As with every good idea that came into his head, Steve wanted to act on it immediately. Just take it in stride, I said to myself. But he was so sincere. We’d talked about having children before, but for some reason it hit him that the time was now. “We have got to have children,” he said. “I know that if we have kids, they will carry on when we’re gone.” “Great,” I said. “Let’s get right on that.” Steve kept pacing around the living room, talking about all the advantages of having kids--how I’d been so passionate about carrying on with the family business back in Oregon, and how he felt the same way about the zoo. He just knew our kids would feel the same too. I said, “You know, there’s no guarantee that we won’t have a son who grows up to be a shoe salesman in Malaysia.” “Come off the grass,” Steve said. “Any kid of ours is going to be a wildlife warrior.” I thought of the whale calves following their mamas below the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight and prepared myself for a new adventure with Steve, maybe the greatest adventure of all.

Sir, are you her guardian, or are you not?' she demanded. 'No,' he replied, his voice grave, but his eyes dancing. 'I am an abductor. I met her only yesterday, and that by chance, snatched her up into my curricle, and bore her off in spite of all her protests to a gloomy mansion in the heart of the country. I need scarcely tell you that she contrived to make her escape from the mansion while I slept. However, it takes a good deal to daunt a thorough-going villain, so you won't be surprised that here I am, having hunted her down remorselessly. I am now about to carry her off to my castle. This, by the way, is perched on a precipitous rock, and, besides being in an uncomfortable state of neglect and decay, is inhabited only by ghosts and sinster retainers of mine. From this fortress, after undergoing a number of extremely alarming adventures, she will, I have little doubt, be rescued by a noble youth of handsome though poverty-stricken aspect. I expect he will kill me, after which it will be found that he is the wronged heir to a vast property - probably mine - and all will end happily.

She was my cherry blossom. An unrivaled beauty, limited in its life. A beauty so extreme in its grace that it can’t last. It stays to enrich our lives, then drifts away in the wind. Never forgotten. Because it reminds us we must live. That life is fragile, yet in that fragility, there is strength. There is love. There is purpose. It reminds us that life is short, that our breaths are numbered and our destiny is fixed, regardless of how hard we fight. It reminds us not to waste a single second. Live hard, love harder. Chase dreams, seek adventures … capture moments. Live beautifully.

Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time-of-day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and rhinoceros would have astonished him very much. Now,

Let us grant courage and the love of pure adventure their own justification, even if we cannot produce any material support for them. Mankind has developed an ugly habit of only allowing true courage to the killers. Great credits accrue to the one who bests another; little is given to the man who recognises in his comrade on the rope a part of himself, who for long hours of extreme peril faces no opponent to be shot or struck down, but whose battle is solely against his own weakness and insufficiency. Is the man who, at moments when his own life is in the balance, has not only to safeguard it but, at the same time, his friend's- even to the extent of mutual self-sacrifice- to receive less recognition than a boxer n the ring, simply because the nature of what he is doing is not properly understood? In his book about the Dachstein, Kurt Maix writes: "Climbing is th emost royl irrationality out of which Man, in his creative imagination, has been able to fashion the highest personal values." Those personal values, which we gain from our approach to the mountains, are great enough to enrich our life. Is not the irrationality of its very lack of purpose the deepest argument for climbing? But we had better leave philosophical niceties and unsuitable psychoanalisis out of this.

When I finally leave the market, the streets are dark, and I pass a few blocks where not a single electric light appears – only dark open storefronts and coms (fast-food eateries), broom closet-sized restaurants serving fish, meat, and rice for under a dollar, flickering candles barely revealing the silhouettes of seated figures. The tide of cyclists, motorbikes, and scooters has increased to an uninterrupted flow, a river that, given the slightest opportunity, diverts through automobile traffic, stopping it cold, spreads into tributaries that spill out over sidewalks, across lots, through filling stations. They pour through narrow openings in front of cars: young men, their girlfriends hanging on the back; families of four: mom, dad, baby, and grandma, all on a fragile, wobbly, underpowered motorbike; three people, the day’s shopping piled on a rear fender; women carrying bouquets of flapping chickens, gathered by their feet while youngest son drives and baby rests on the handlebars; motorbikes carrying furniture, spare tires, wooden crates, lumber, cinder blocks, boxes of shoes. Nothing is too large to pile onto or strap to a bike. Lone men in ragged clothes stand or sit by the roadsides, selling petrol from small soda bottles, servicing punctures with little patch kits and old bicycle pumps.

My mother has always loved piano music and hungered to play. When she was in her early sixties, she retired from her job as a computer programmer so that she could devote herself more fully to the piano. As she had done with her dog obsession, she took her piano education to an extreme. She bought not one, not two, but three pianos. One was the beautiful Steinway B, a small grand piano she purchased with a modest inheritance left by a friend of her parents’. She photocopied all of her music in a larger size so she could see it better and mounted it on manila folders. She practiced for several hours every day. When she wasn’t practicing the piano she was talking about the piano. I love pianos, too, and wrote an entire book about the life of one piano, a Steinway owned by the renowned pianist Glenn Gould. And I shared my mother’s love for her piano. During phone conversations, I listened raptly as she told me about the instrument’s cross-country adventures. Before bringing the Steinway north, my mother had mentioned that she was considering selling it. I was surprised, but instead of reminding her that, last I knew, she was setting it aside for me, I said nothing, unable to utter the simple words, “But, Mom, don’t you remember your promise?” If I did, it would be a way of asking for something, and asking my mother for something was always dangerous because of the risk of disappointment.

Thy prospects are poor. The desperate dance, in which thy fortunes are caught up, will last yet many a sinful year; we should not care to set a high stake on thy life by the time it ends. We even confess that it is without great concern we leave the question open. Adventures of the flesh and in the spirit, while enhancing thy simplicity, granted thee to know in the spirit what in the flesh thou scarcely couldst have done. Moments there were, when out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee, as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?

Nudity is a gray area. We certainly don’t think kids are harmed by growing up in households where casual nudity is the norm. But children who have never been around nude adults may be upset if nudity is suddenly introduced into their living room. Kids can be very sensitive to issues like sexual display, and flashing is clearly a violation of boundaries. Certainly, if a child expresses discomfort with being around your or your friends’ nudity, his or her desires should be respected. And we hope it goes without saying that no child should ever be required to be nude in front of others—many children go through phases of extreme modesty as they struggle to cope with their changing bodies, and that, too, deserves scrupulous respect. What

I’d just settled into bed when Sophie hailed me. Somehow she hurt herself bottling starlight for her Universe assignment. (Always an adventure with this girl!) SYMPTOMS/INJURIES: Major burns with blackish, purplish blisters. Looked super painful. Glad she set aside her fears and hailed me. TREATMENT: I started with my strongest burn salve mixed with painkiller and a Youth soak. But her skin still looked raw, so I ran home for something a little more extreme. (I figured Sophie wouldn’t want to know that her hands were covered in yeti pee, so I left out that detail—but I did warn her to wash her hands thoroughly.) NOTES: I also wrapped up the starlight to make sure she couldn’t hurt herself again. Weird thing was, it felt cold—not hot. And I’ve never seen light like that before—or heard of UPDATE: Sophie stopped by early (I think she didn’t want her friends to see her in the Healing Center again), and her hands looked perfect! But I still gave her one more elixir, just to be safe. ADDITIONAL NOTES: In the category of Proof That Things Keep Getting Weirder Around Here, a couple of Councillors showed up and asked me a billion questions—and made me black out the star’s name from this record. Pretty sure I know what that means.…

I can’t help thinking,” she confided when he finished answering her questions about women in India who covered their faces and hair in public, “that it is grossly unfair that I was born a female and so must never know such adventures, or see but a few of those places. Even if I were to journey there, I’d only be allowed to go where everything was as civilized as-as London!” “There does seem to be a case of extreme disparity between the privileges accorded the sexes,” Ian agreed. “Still, we each have our duty to perform,” she informed him with sham solemnity. “And there’s said to be great satisfaction in that.” “How do you view your-er-duty?” he countered, responding to her teasing tone with a lazy white smile. “That’s easy. It is a female’s duty to be a wife who is an asset to her husband in every way. It is a male’s duty to do whatever he wishes, whenever he wishes, so long as he is prepared to defend his country should the occasion demand it in his lifetime-which it very likely won’t. Men,” she informed him, “gain honor by sacrificing themselves on the field of battle while we sacrifice ourselves on the altar of matrimony.” He laughed aloud then, and Elizabeth smiled back at him, enjoying herself hugely. “Which, when one considers it, only proves that our sacrifice is by far the greater and more noble.” “How is that?” he asked, still chuckling. “It’s perfectly obvious-battles last mere days or weeks, months at the very most. While matrimony lasts a lifetime! Which brings to mind something else I’ve often wondered about,” she continued gaily, giving full rein to her innermost thoughts. “And that is?” he prompted, grinning, watching her as if he never wanted to stop. “Why do you suppose, after all that, they call us the weaker sex?” Their laughing gazes held, and then Elizabeth realized how outrageous he must be finding some of her remarks. “I don’t usually go off on such tangents,” she said ruefully. “You must think I’m dreadfully ill-bred.” “I think,” he softly said, “that you are magnificent.” The husky sincerity in his deep voice snatched her breath away. She opened her mouth, thinking frantically for some light reply that could restore the easy camaraderie of a minute before, but instead of speaking she could only draw a long, shaky breath. “And,” he continued quietly, “I think you know it.” This was not, not the sort of foolish, flirtatious repartee she was accustomed to from her London beaux, and it terrified her as much as the sensual look in those golden eyes. Pressing imperceptibly back against the arm of the sofa, she told herself she was only overacting to what was nothing more than empty flattery. “I think,” she managed with a light laugh that stuck in her throat, “that you must find whatever female you’re with ‘magnificent.’” “Why would you say a thing like that?” Elizabeth shrugged. “Last night at supper, for one thing.” When he frowned at her as if she were speaking in a foreign language, she prodded, “You remember Lady Charise Dumont, our hostess, the same lovely brunette on whose every word you were hanging at supper last night?” His frown became a grin. “Jealous?” Elizabeth lifted her elegant little chin and shook her head. “No more than you were of Lord Howard.” She felt a small bit of satisfaction as his amusement vanished. “The fellow who couldn’t seem to talk to you without touching your arm?” he inquired in a silky-soft voice. “That Lord Howard? As a matter of fact, my love, I spent most of my meal trying to decide whether I wanted to shove his nose under his right ear or his left.” Startled, musical laughter erupted from her before she could stop it. “You did nothing of the sort,” she chuckled. “Besides, if you wouldn’t duel with Lord Everly when he called you a cheat, you certainly wouldn’t harm poor Lord Howard merely for touching my arm.” “Wouldn’t I?” he asked softly. “Those are two very different issues.

The blonde was staring at herself in the mirror, taking on a thoughtful, reflective tone. “Well, it isn’t easy. And his mood changes in an instant. But he collects different girls for different flavors – so one girl doesn’t have to be everybody and everything.” “Oh.” I splashed water on my face and stared for a moment at the mask in the mirror. “You’re just his type, totally. With all the tattoos, you are utterly monstrous, if you don’t mind my saying so. Punk-Goth gone mad.” She swung around to take a close, direct look. “I never saw the point of tattoos, mind you, just fad and fashion. But,” she focused on me, stared, grinned, and rolled her eyes. “My God, darling, you really are perfect! How could you do that to yourself?” She licked her lips. “I think you will be a success. As I said, Sergei loves tattoos. He’s totally into the weird and the monstrous. He adores freaks – and kid, you are about as freakish as they come.” “You think so.” I turned my mask towards her and gave her an extra big smile – I was even more grotesque, Martine told me, when I smiled. “Oh, Gwen, how totally utterly horrible!” she declared and then kissed me to console me for having become a monster. As I grinned at Sergei’s girl, the metal rings in my ears clanked against each other. I could feel the large ring nose, warm, smooth steel, against my curled upper lip. “Yes, you look like a masterpiece of self-loathing.” “It’s called body art,” I said, “It’s a statement.” “A statement?” “Absolutely,” I hiccupped. Everything was fuzzy; I forced myself to focus. “Whatever it is, you’ll be a big success. Sergei collects waifs who suffer from extreme self-hatred. Self-destructive and self-hating girls are one of his hobbies. You can do so much with them.