When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug - Rebecca Solnit

"Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters."

But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.

"Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.