Walden On Wheels Quotes

We need so little to be happy. Happiness does not come from things. Happiness comes from living a full and exciting life.

Perhaps there’s no better act of simplification than climbing a mountain. For an afternoon, a day, or a week, it’s a way of reducing a complicated life into a simple goal. All you have to do is take one step at a time, place one foot in front of the other, and refuse to turn back until you’ve given everything you have.

I thought of a Saint Francis of Assisi quote. He said, “He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

Envy is a bitter fruit, but one that only grows when we water it with the nourishment of society. Remove society, and it will wither on the vine.

His thoughts were wheeling and dipping like the gulls over the estuary, groping for an explanation, feeling at last he was making sense of what lie behind Walden's death...

Real poverty has little to do with being broke. Real poverty is not being able to change your circumstances

On this voyage, I couldn't help but think we need need. We need to be forced to go outside. We need to be forced to depend on one another. we need to be forced to sacrifice, to grow a garden, to fix a rood, to interact with neighbors. Nature has been all around me as a boy. It unleashed terrifying storms, spun circular cycles, inflicted bone-chilling, cold and renewed itself with springy revivifications. Yet I was completely oblivious to it all. I was playing video games.

Discomforts are only discomforting when they’re an unexpected inconvenience, an unusual annoyance, an unplanned-for irritant. Discomforts are only discomforting when we aren’t used to them. But when we deal with the same discomforts every day, they become expected and part of the routine, and we are no longer afflicted with them the way we were. We forget to think about them like the daily disturbances of going to the bathroom, or brushing our teeth, or listening to noisy street traffic. Give your body the chance to harden, your blood to thicken, and your skin to toughen, and you’ll find that the human body carries with it a weightless wardrobe. When we’re hardy in mind and body, we can select from an array of outfits to comfortably bear most any climate.

When your life is all toil and hardship, the things that matter and the bullshit that doesn’t become easy to separate.

Why should I listen to society? Society—as far as I was concerned—was insane. To me, society was boob jobs and sweaters on dogs and environmental devastation of incalculable proportions. We do not listen to the lunatic on the city corner who screeches every day about how the world is going to end, so why should I stop and let society shout nonsense in my ears? These

We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?

Life is simpler when we feel controlled. When we tell ourselves that we are controlled, we can shift the responsibility of freeing ourselves onto that which controls us. When we do that, we don’t have to bear the responsibility of our unhappiness or shoulder the burden of self-ownership. We don’t have to do anything. And nothing will ever change.

As a country, we take out loans and go to school. We take out loans and buy a car. We take out loans and buy a home. It's not always that we simply "want" these things. Rather, it's often the case that we use our obligations as confirmations that "We're doing something." If we have things to pay for, we need a job. If we have a job, we need a car. If we have such things, we have a life, albeit an ordinary and monotonous life, but a life no less. If we have debt, we have a goal-- we have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Debt narrows our options. It gives us a good reason to stick it out at a job, sink into sofas, and savor the comforts of the status quo. Debt is sought so we have a game to play, a battle to fight, a mythology to live out. It gives us a script to read, rules to abide by, instructions to follow. And when we see someone who doesn't play by our rules-- someone who's spurned the comforts of hearth and home-- we shift in our chairs and call him or her crazy. We feel a fury for the hobo and the hitchhiker, the hippie and gypsy, the vagrant and nomad-- not because we have any reason to believe these people will do us any harm, but because they make us feel uncomfortable.They remind us of the inner longings we've squelched, the hero or heroine we've buried beneath a houseful of junk, the spirit we've exorcised out of ourselves so we could remain with our feet on the ground, stable and secure.

I am a member of the “career-less generation.” Or the “screwed generation.” Unlike previous generations, the members of my generation won’t get jobs and respectable wages straight out of high school, let alone college. We don’t have the means to buy homes and start families in our twenties. We’re the first generation in a while who will be less well off and less secure than their parents’. Strangely, I seemed more okay with this than my parents. Not being able to afford an above-ground swimming pool and a kid wasn’t some heartbreaking tragedy to me.

Now we are going to be late for lunch. By the time we get there there will be nothing but salad left,’ he said plaintively. ‘I think you can stand to miss one lunch, Franz,’ Nigel sighed, ‘or we could always get someone to wheel us down to the dining hall and spoon-feed us, I suppose.’ Franz’s eyes lit up at the suggestion. ‘This is being an excellent idea. Otto, you and Wing could help us, ja?’ The hope was evident in his tone. ‘Erm, we’d love to help, guys, but we’ve got to . . . erm . . .’ Otto looked at Wing desperately. He doubted that either of them would be strong enough to wheel Franz all the way to the dining hall – there was an awful lot of hardened foam encasing his ample frame. ‘We have to go to the library,’ Wing stepped in, ‘we have . . . erm . . .’ ‘Chess club, yes, that’s it, chess club,’ Otto said suddenly, backing away towards the exit. ‘Otherwise, you know we would be happy to help,’ Wing smiled. Otto and Wing walked quickly towards the door. ‘I was not knowing that Otto and Wing were interested in chess,’ Franz said as the other two boys beat a hasty retreat. Nigel just sighed.

I wonder what Thoreau would have done...[H}is greatest story, I thought, was his life. He knew that anything is possible when you wield the pen and claim your life as your own. But the truth is so few have the privilege to write their own stories. People are born into poverty without a hope of redemption. Children are abused and damaged. Disease and war and famine and a million other things prevent them from wielding the pen. But for those of us who can, should it not be our great privilege to live the lives we've imagined? To be who we want to be? To go on our own great journeys and share our experiences with others?

Like us, many students had spent their years in college thinking they’d get that well-paying, planet-saving job, even if they’d heard horror stories from recent underemployed grads. Those jobs, of course, no longer exist (if they ever did). By 2009, 17.4 million college graduates had jobs that didn’t even require a degree. There are 365,000 cashiers and 318,000 waiters and waitresses in America who have bachelor’s degrees, as do one-fifth of those working in the retail industry. More than 100,000 college graduates are janitors and 18,000 push carts. (There are 5,057 janitors in the United States who have doctorates and professional degrees!)

A college education is one of the few purchases a person can make that cannot be repossessed or auctioned off

I graduated on a May afternoon. When the director of ceremonies ended her speech, I had no desire to triumphantly fling my graduation cap into the air as a gesture of my newfound freedom. There was nothing liberating about leaving college: I’d ended one series of obligations only to enter into another. I looked with fear and uncertainty at the long road ahead.

Yet as the days went by and the pains in my feet subsided, I began to look back on my little adventure with a hint of fondness. When it comes to memories, it seems we all have an editor within who will—if it’ll make for a good story—revise the senseless into symbols, or rephrase miseries into warm memories.

Because Sami had never had the chance to acquaint herself with the adventurous sensations her soul longed to nourish itself with, she'd seen little reason to go through the trouble of living. Comfort and security, it seems, when overprescribed, can be poisons to the soul -- an illness that no amount of love can cure, freedom being the only antidote.

Sometimes it’s not until you see your shackles that you see your dreams. The soul must first be caged before it can be set free.

They dwelled beneath poverty lines and were undereducated, but they were—in the ways that mattered most—far more civilized than the finely bred and carefully raised, for there is no demographic that has a sharper instinct for empathy than the downtrodden.

I felt a strange twinge of anger looking at the stars. It was as if I’d just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it wasn’t for Alaska, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what a real sky was supposed to look like, which made me wonder: If I’d gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view?

Stare—really stare—into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation. When you see the aurora, the only logical choice you can make is to spend the rest of your life seeking the sublime.

When it comes to memories, it seems we all have an editor within who will—if it’ll make for a good story—revise the senseless into symbols, or rephrase miseries into warm memories.

The trouble with Eichmann,” the Arendt quote read, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, [but] that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.

I’d once heard that we are nothing but our stories. Forget the blood and bones and genes and cells. They’re not what we are. We are, rather, our stories. We are an accumulation of experiences that we have fashioned into our own grand, sweeping narrative.

Money, prestige, possessions, a home with two and a half bathrooms—these aren’t the guiding lights of the universe that show us our path. How can we dedicate our lives to such things when we can see the impermanence of everything above and below us, in the flicker of a dying star or the decay of a rotting log?

I no longer wished to have a diluted life, made faint by living according to the norms and values of an older generation who’d forgotten what it felt like to have the impassioned representatives of soul and spirit lobby their vessel with an unrelenting persistence to take them on an adventure.

In the arctic, seasons do not melt peaceably into one another as they do in other climes, giving each other handshakes, fond farewells, and see-ya-next-years. In the arctic, winter stands like a barbarian horde on the edge of town one day and ravages it the next. Winter moves in without warning, grabs summer by the belt loops of its cutoffs, and throws it out the door.

When in a Mississippi jungle, you feel as if you’re at the mercy of dark desires and ancient impulses. Despite unprecedented levels of pollution, cancerous suburban sprawl, and devastating natural disasters, the animals and insects still thrive in Mississippi. But not as much as the humans, the worst of all in Mississippi’s animal kingdom, who reproduce with as little forethought as the cicadas restlessly moaning for mates in the bayou. Mississippi

In the 1930s, Americans hopped trains. In the 1950s, beat poets wrote about road trips. In the 1960s, we hitched rides. Today, however, it seems like the whole “coming of age” adventure has been abridged from a young person’s life experience, leaving no gap, no bridge, no moment of real freedom in between school and career. I

Joyce said, ‘When the soul of a man is born… there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us.

Koviashuvik is an Inuit word that means “time and place of joy in the present moment.

While living in the van started off as an experiment, it was clear to me that it was a way of life I’d never truly leave.

for there is no demographic that has a sharper instinct for empathy than the downtrodden. While

Jack, being young is so hard. You knew that instinctively and that’s why you chose to wait. I’ve seen men and women in their sixties, in wheel chairs or in physical therapy who state flat-out that they would never again wish to be in their teens. Because it’s just too painful. It’s all about learning from mistakes, and that is never a comfortable thing. It’s all trial and error. Sometimes, the error part leaves scars.

freedom was simply being able to entertain the prospect of changing your circumstances.

I could sense the slightest abridgment of my freedom like a princess who can feel the impression of a pea under forty featherbeds. I felt it when I was in romantic relationships. I felt it when I was given a gift. I felt it when someone held even the faintest influence over me. And when I felt it, I felt rage—

But is freedom from work really freedom? Is our money—no matter how we acquire it—a ticket to freedom?

I learned such a glimpse cannot be gotten with half-hearted journeys and soft endeavors. Nor could I hope for such a glimpse merely by setting out to conquer some random geographic feature, like getting to the top of a mountain. Rather, I knew one must confront the very beasts and chasms that haunt our dreams, block our paths, and muffle the voice of the wild man howling in all of us, who calls for you to become you—the you who culture cannot shape, the you who is unalterable, uncivilizable, pure. You.

I felt a strange twinge of anger looking at the stars. It was as if I’d just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it wasn’t for Alaska, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what a real sky was supposed to look like, which made me wonder: If I’d gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view? We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?

Money, prestige, possessions, a home with two and a half bathrooms—these aren’t the guiding lights of the universe that show us our path. How can we dedicate our lives to such things when we can see the impermanence of everything above and below us, in the flicker of a dying star or the decay of a rotting log? The statues, the paintings, the epic poems, the things we buy, the homes we strive to attain, the great cities and timeless monuments. In time, they’ll all be gone. And the names of the great kings and queens who shook the world will be forgotten, carried away like crumpled leaves from autumn limbs. Stare—really stare—into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation. When you see the aurora, the only logical choice you can make is to spend the rest of your life seeking the sublime.

My SOUTH sign stopped working on an entrance ramp in a sleepy farm town called Kittitas in the state of Washington. A man who introduced himself as Juan Hernandez—a Mexican immigrant with a contracting business in Yakima—saw me and decided to pull over, even though he wasn’t heading in my direction. He took me to a Wendy’s and, despite my objections, bought me a hamburger and fries, which he watched me eat. He spoke in broken, hard-to-understand English, but his passion for his god and his America was palpable. He spoke with no hint of cynicism, of sarcasm, of guile. He only spoke of how happy he was to raise his baby girl, Genesis, here in America and to be able to buy nice clothes for his family. When he dropped me off, I sat down on my pack and covered my eyes with my hands to hide the tears streaming down my cheeks. This was neither the first nor the last time I had difficulty bearing other people’s generosity. Even though I had liked to think I was a solo adventurer, I realized that I was never really alone. I walked a tightwire above a net of compassion, stretched out by the hands of strangers

Sometimes I wished for the temperature to be warmer, but why live in a chronic state of want, constantly hoping for heat in winter and cold in summer?

Sometimes, to cede control to fate, I realized, is to assume more control than ever before. I wasn’t just traveling anymore. I was traveling outside the formula. I might as well have been floating through space, trailing my hand in stardust.

Be a devotee in the Church of the Consumer and you’ll forever live in fear of the capricious God of Style. Freedom, though, is an honest pair of eyes, a healthy physique, a cheerful laugh. Style goes out of style. Freedom is forever.

Remember who you wanted to be. — BUMPER STICKER ON VOLVO IN THE HOME DEPOT PARKING LOT

against the walls of the machine. After being slid in, I began to feel the first tremors of panic. In an instant, my world had gotten a lot smaller and darker and weirder. It seemed inevitable that in moments I’d be squealing for someone to get me the hell out of there and flailing my limbs (though to little effect, because one can only move so much in an MRI scanner only fifty-five centimeters wide). But just as quickly as the panic came, it vanished upon being lulled into boredom by the groan of the scanner. After two hours, the technologist pulled me out pink-faced and squinty-eyed. I sat on the scanner bed for a moment, trying to reorient myself to real life. That was awful. I told myself that I’d never do another MRI session, but after she handed me $50, I found myself asking how to sign up for more. I also interviewed to become a tutor at an inner-city elementary school for a work-study program called America Reads. I showed up in my least-wrinkled dress shirt and a pair of slacks that I’d worn

Life is simpler when we feel controlled. When we tell ourselves that we are controlled, we can shift the responsibility of freeing ourselves onto that which controls us.

I drifted through the weary waters of high school on a dinghy of disdain.

Koviashuvik is an Inuit word that means “time and place of joy in the present moment.” I’d used to think that the word

These are society’s definitions of poverty and wealth: To be poor is to have less and to be rich is to have more. Under these definitions, we are always poor, always covetous, always dissatisfied, no matter the size of our salary, or how comfortable we are, or if our needs are in fact fulfilled.

I wonder what Thoreau would have done...[H}is greatest story, I thought, was his life. He knew that anything is possible when you wield the pen and claim your life as your own. But the truth is so few have the privilege to write their own stories. People are born into poverty without a hope of redemption. Children are abused and damaged. Disease and war and famine and a million other things prevent them from wielding the pen. But for those of us who can, should it not be our great privilege to live the lives we've imagined? To be who we want to be? To go on our own great journeys and share our experiences with others?

I wonder what Thoreau would have done...[H}is greatest story, I thought, was his life. He knew that anything is possible when you wield the pen and claim your life as your own. But the truth is so few have the privilege to write their own stories. People are born into poverty without a hope of redemption. Children are abused and damaged. Disease and war and famine and a million other things prevent them from wielding the pen. But for those of us who can, should it not be our great privilege to live the lives we've imagined? To be who we want to be? To go on our own great journeys and share our experiences with others?

Most were just too scared to leave. They tolerated the daily drudgery of work because dealing with daily drudgery was easier than quitting and doing something truly scary: sailing into unknown waters in pursuit of a dream.

only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?

If you went purely by numbers, then books would win hands down. I’ve loved maybe a handful of people in my entire life, compared with tens or maybe even hundreds of books (and here I’m counting only those books I’ve really loved, the kind that make you happy just to look at them, that make you smile regardless of what else is happening in your life, that you always turn back to like an old friend and can remember exactly where you first “met” them—I’m sure you know just what I’m talking about). But that handful of people you love…they’re surely worth just as much as all of those books. Your question got me to start rereading Walden.

The university today is not a place where we go to question the dominant institutions; it is a place where we learn to support them.

If freedom was our fear, debt was our gravity.

Koviashuvik is an Inuit word that means “time and place of joy in the present moment.” I’d used to think that the word probably meant something like “nirvana,” attained only by the Eskimo version of the bald, saffron-robed man on a mountaintop who’s able to achieve a state of unity with everything. Maybe that was the case, but more and more, I began to believe that to live a happy present requires having lived a full past. It requires that we go on our own journey. And if we are so lucky as to reach the end of that tortuous, troubled path, we may be afforded the gleaming vista of self-discovery. This, I thought, was koviashuvik.

When I thought about my hitchhikes, the voyageur trip, Duke—I was happy to have suffered; I was happy to have been miserable; I was happy to have been alone. And I knew I’d soon be happy to have been scared half to death by that bear. That’s because it was in those moments, when I was pushed to my limits, that I was afforded a glimpse of my true nature.

As a country, we take out loans and go to school. We take out loans and buy a car. We take out loans and buy a home. It’s not always that we simply “want” these things. Rather, it’s often the case that we use our obligations as confirmations that “we’re doing something.” If we have things to pay for, we need a job. If we have a job, we need a car. If we have such things, we have a life, albeit an ordinary and monotonous life, but a life no less. If we have debt, we have a goal—we have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Debt narrows our options. It gives us a good reason to stick it out at a job, sink into sofas, and savor the comforts of the status quo. Debt is sought so we have a game to play, a battle to fight, a mythology to live out. It gives us a script to read, rules to abide by, instructions to follow. And when we see someone who doesn’t play by our rules—someone who’s spurned the comforts of hearth and home—we shift in our chairs and call him or her crazy. We feel a fury for the hobo and the hitchhiker, the hippie and gypsy, the vagrant and nomad—not because we have any reason to believe these people will do us any harm, but because they make us feel uncomfortable. They remind us of the inner longings we’ve squelched, the hero or heroine we’ve buried beneath a houseful of junk, the spirit we’ve exorcised out of ourselves so we could remain with our feet on the ground, stable and secure.

I am a member of the “career-less generation.” Or the “screwed generation.” Unlike previous generations, the members of my generation won’t get jobs and respectable wages straight out of high school, let alone college. We don’t have the means to buy homes and start families in our twenties. We’re the first generation in a while who will be less well off and less secure than their parents’.

He was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, as Arendt’s words had shown him how corrupt governments are empowered by a complacent citizenry.

You. Koviashuvik is an Inuit word that means “time and place of joy in the present moment.

Maybe that was the case, but more and more, I began to believe that to live a happy present requires having lived a full past.

when the arts are scattered onto college campuses, they create a healthy soil into which students can plant themselves and grow into empathetic, introspective, and conscientious citizens.