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.
One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.
There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in - that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.
It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers.
Christ is much more powerful to save, than Adam was to destroy.
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