Map Your Own Journey Go on your own journey. Don’t let others hold you back; don’t hold them back. Don’t judge their journey, and don’t let them judge yours. All persons are free to have the experiences their souls lead them to.

There’s nothing easy about finding your way through a world loaded with obstacles that others can’t or don’t see. When you are different, you can feel as if you’re operating with a different map, a different set of navigational challenges, than those around you. Sometimes, you feel like you have no map at all. Your differentness will often precede you into a room; people see it before they see you. Which leaves you with the task of overcoming

I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.
It is one of a kind
just as yours is.

I really do believe that all of you are at the beginning of a wonderful journey. As you start traveling down that road of life, remember this: There are never enough comfort stops. The places you're going to are never on the map. And once you get that map out, you won't be able to re-fold it no matter how smart you are.

So forget the map, roll down the windows, and whenever you can pull over and have picnic with a pig. And if you can help it never fly as cargo.

That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.

Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.

I started out alone to seek adventures. You don't really have to seek them—that is nothing but a phrase—they come to you.

Like all worthwhile art, the piece invites us on a journey that has no path nor map, nor even an endpoint. Only a process, footsteps through the mind of an artist now forever lost to us.

I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back.

Go somewhere you know nothing about and see what happens.

To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you know not.

...when you're on your pilgrimage, you don't even need to know where you're going. You just have to know when you're off your path.

To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.