Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't — and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scena… - Rebecca Solnit

...[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an allegory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).

To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live.