Elisabeth Eaves Quotes & Sayings

To pursue the thing she needed to do, Virginia Woolf wrote, "a woman must have money and a room of her own ... " I needed money and a backpack. — Elisabeth Eaves

We jumped into water so clear and warm that it was like jumping from air to air. The sand rose up under us and we floated to where it met the sea and walked out of the water like creatures in an act of evolution. — Elisabeth Eaves

The paradox of love is that to have it is to want to preserve it because it's perfect in the moment but that preservation is impossible because the perfection is only ever an instant passed through. Love like travel is a series of moments that we immediately leave behind. Still we try to hold on and embalm against all evidence and common sense proclaiming our promises and plans. The more I loved him the more I felt hope. But hope acknowledges uncertainty and so I also felt my first premonitions of loss. — Elisabeth Eaves

Wanderlust, the very strong or irresistible impulse to travel, is adopted untouched from the German, presumably because it couldn't be improved upon. Workarounds like the French passion du voyage don't quite capture the same meaning. Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly; it's something more animal and more fickle - something more like lust. We don't lust after many things in life. We don't need words like worklust or homemakinglust. — Elisabeth Eaves

I know it's not strictly sex that accounts for my straying the motive usually attributed to men. I think it's just too tempting to have two lives rather than one. Some people think that too much travel begets infidelity: Separation and opportunity test the bonds of love. I think it's more likely that people who hate to make choices to settle on one thing or another are attracted to travel. Travel doesn't beget a double life. The appeal of the double life begets travel. — Elisabeth Eaves

Floating in the void free of gravity I made my way along the side of the ship. I listened to my own breaths. It was so dark and I was so weightless that I had to look for my bubbles to be sure which way was up. I swam backward a little away from the boat and into outer space and waved my arm through the water. Sure enough the phosphorescents appeared trailing my movement like the tail of a shooting star. I let myself tip upside down and floated there watching the gentle snowstorm marveling that a world of such strangeness existed here all the time just under the surface. — Elisabeth Eaves

It was the inverse of an island in the sea. — Elisabeth Eaves

I followed my wanderlust. It bruised me sometimes, and took me to all kinds of highs. Now that my thirst is slaked, I get to start anew. — Elisabeth Eaves

There were other things we noticed only at first, before we accepted them as a part of daily life. Then they got harder to describe, the way it's hard to describe what it feels like to breathe air. — Elisabeth Eaves

There's always a parallel story. The paths not taken go on in our heads. — Elisabeth Eaves

Academics have spent too much time trying to explain objectification, considering that there's an easy way to make white, Western men understand: You just have to go out in public somewhere poor. You become a thing. Your conscious and unique self becomes irrelevant, as a thousand eyes try to figure out how to best tap your wealth. And objectification begets objectification. The harassers become an undifferentiated mass themselves, made up of identical things that torment. — Elisabeth Eaves

We carried bottled water and day packs and cameras, except for Fred, who said he didn't believe in taking photographs; he planned to store his memories in his head, an idea I found incomprehensibly radical. My impulse to record was almost on par with my impulse to travel — Elisabeth Eaves

Travel is life-changing. That's the promise made by a thousand websites and magazines, by philosophers and writers down the ages. Mark Twain said it was fatal to prejudice, and Thomas Jefferson said it made you wise. Anais Nin observed that "we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls." It's all true. Self-transformation is what I sought and what I found. — Elisabeth Eaves

From my distance the loss was theoretical, and though I couldn't have said so, I preferred it that way. I felt relieved to be so far away, because I was excused from grieving. I felt nothing but tenderness for her, but there was an emotional emancipation to being here and not there. Even though I didn't believe in God or heaven, I could childishly go on believing that she was still around. When it happened, the specific timing of my grandmother's death seemed like a footnote: She died just after I went away. But a lesson would persist as I formed and unformed long-distance relationships over the years. Going away could free you from feeling too much. — Elisabeth Eaves

In her fury she'd broken into Valencian, indicating the deepest possible roots in the land. I was impressed with how deeply she was from here, in a way I could never imagine being from anywhere, not even my home town. — Elisabeth Eaves