You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Interpretation
Change is a fundamental aspect of life, and experiences transform us permanently.
This quote by Paul Theroux suggests that when we undergo significant experiences or spend time away from familiar surroundings, those experiences fundamentally change who we are. Upon returning, we may find that while we may try to reconnect with our past selves, we have evolved in ways that make it impossible to revert completely to our old identities.
In practice
In a graduation speech to emphasize personal growth over the years.
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? βShe drove me to my practice at four in the morning,β etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
According to Gandhi, the seven sins are wealth without works, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle. Well, Hubert Humphrey may have sinned in the eyes of God, as we all do, but according to those definitions of Gandhi's, it was Hubert Humphrey without sin.
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
World has things which full fill man needs, but not greeds.
Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.
I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? Itβs not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity. Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy. The miracle of not having to talk about oneself.
A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.
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