A writer at heart, I’m a sucker for good quotes. My University of Delaware journalism professors always said quotes give a story its personality. I can only hope that one day my quotes will be colorful enough to make someone else’s blog page. These are some of my favorite travel-related quotes that inspired me to make the leap from homebody to backpacker.

• “He who jumps into the void, owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” — Jean Luc Godard

• “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” — Judith Thurman

• “I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.” — Anaïs Nin

• “If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.” — Jane Austen

• “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” — Jack Kerouac

• “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” — Lao Tzu

• “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” — Maya Angelou