“Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.” 

“When someone asks me if I believe in God and I say no—I believe in people—I” 

“In truth, we don't know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.” 

“My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.” 

“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.” 

“we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.” 

“You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.” 

“I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.” 

“As Dr. King once said, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” 

“It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.” 

“I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.” 

“Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.” 

“That's why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.” 

“In many languages, even the word for human being is “one who goes on migrations.” Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.” 

“In fact, there are many unique satisfactions here. One is that Americans seem to outstrip every nation for hope. Perhaps because so many of us came in flight from something worse, or rose from poverty here, or absorbed the fact and fiction of the “land of opportunity,” or just because optimism itself is contagious—whatever the reason, hopefulness is what I miss the most when I’m not here. It’s the thing that makes me glad to come home. After all, hope is a form of planning.”

“Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.” 

“Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.” 

“When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.” 

“I think the revolutionary role of a writer is to make language that makes coalition possible, language that makes us see things in a new way.” 

“We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful. p176” 

“More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.” 

“Voting isn't the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.” 

“This balance between tribe and individuality, community and uniqueness, was a surprise in a world that makes us think we have to make a choice between them.” 

“hate generalizes, love specifies”