Road Quotes

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Life is filled with unanswered questions, but it is the courage to seek those answers that continues to give meaning to life. You can spend your life wallowing in despair, wondering why you were the one who was led towards the road strewn with pain, or you can be grateful that you are strong enough to survive it.”
― J.D. Stroube, Caged by Damnation

“Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost.”
― Erol Ozan

“The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”
― Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca

“If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.”
― Vera Nazarian

“Life is not always perfect. Like a road, it has many bends, ups and down, but that’s its beauty.”
― Amit Ray, World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird

“The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people, and finally I did on the open road.
We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art.”
― Lana Del Rey

“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.”
― Thomas Ligotti , The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.

Don’t leave now that you’re here—
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.”
― Faiz Ahmad Faiz, 100 Poems by Faiz Ahmed Fiza

“There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.”
― Wendell Berry, Remembering

“A thousand times, people may have touched each other, but never ever sensed a single vein of oneness or complicity in the wilderness of their inner world, since obdurate mental impediments have been barricading the road to understanding and propinquity. (“A thousand times”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“We cannot wait for the other shoe to drop, when the road becomes unendurably bumpy. If the aura of truth starts to wane and the light of the sky begins to splinter, only resilience can settle things. (“Steaming ahead”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“An insipid voice message or an incongruent emergence from the “other” world may disrupt our whole thinking system. If we are not able to deal with the fragmentation of our self and assess the deconstruction of our identity, a corny incident could easily capsize our being. A misinterpretation of facts and expectations may perturb our awareness and unsettle our perception. When “I” and “me” don’t get along very well, the road to oneness may be very often bumpy. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don’t think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.”
― Hyeonseo Lee, The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story

“I'd rather let you cover all my roads with thorns than with dead roses.”
― Nema Al-Araby

“If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.”
― David Livingstone

“Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear

“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“I don't know where my road is going, but I know that I walk better when I hold your hand.”
― Alfred de Musset

“The road to success is always under construction.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

“Any highway . . . they all take you to the same place, don't they?”
― Jodi Picoult, The Pact

“All my life I've always come back to one thing,
my need to feel free and the need to feel the breeze,
the ride provides a freedom this gypsy needs,
where every road is another blessed memory,
a new experience to carry inside my journey,
a sense of belonging to a familiar tribe,
a brotherhood that goes beyond a bloodline.”
― Jess "Chief" Brynjulson, Highway Writings

“Eyes that obstruct the road can be removed, but what happens when hearts block the passage?”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Intelligence arouses fear and respect, the lack of it keeps one on the narrow minded road of disrespect, stupidity and inferiority complex.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“There was rarely an obvious branching point in a person's life. People changed slowly, over time. You didn't take one step, then find yourself in a completely new location. You first took a little step off the path to avoid some rocks. For a while, you walked alongside the path, but then you wandered out a little way to step on softer soil. Then you stopped paying attention as you drifted farther and farther away. Finally, you found yourself in the wrong city, wondering why the signs on the roadway hadn't led you better.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Emperor's Soul

“The night was aromatic with the smell of autumn and the steely fragrance of freshly dampened blacktop. How she loved the smell of road: asphalt baking and soft in July, dirt roads with their dust-and-pollen perfume in June, country lanes spicy with the odor of crushed leaves in sober October, the sand-and-salt smell of the highway, so like an estuary, in February.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2