But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. - Paul Bowles

How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: 'Your life is so simple.' 'Your life seems always to go in a straight line.' Whenever they said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain. He felt that what they really meant to say was: 'You have chosen the easiest terrain.' But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way — and they so clearly did, encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance — that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified his life.

After all, the English are really too much. One can't live in that constipated fashion forever.

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.