Rachel Friedman Quotes

#1. Maybe this is what travel gives you - or gives you back, in most cases - that childlike sense of wonder, and with it a kidstyle openness where you want to finger-paint with anyone and everyone who shows

Rachel Friedman

#2. I started to cry, but no one could tell because it was dark and pouring.

Rachel Friedman

#3. These Aussie girls are free to set their own courses in the world, to meander and experiment. Their travels are not bumps along the road - they are life itself. See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it, not the other way around, as seems the general trajectory in the U.S.

Rachel Friedman

#4. ...being a weatherman in Ireland is about the biggest scam going.

Rachel Friedman

#5. My mom says, "Just keep in mind when you're choosing a career - money doesn't solve everything, but it sure makes life easier." I

Rachel Friedman

#6. It's exciting to fit somewhere when I have felt out of place everywhere for so long.

Rachel Friedman

#7. The geographies of our childhoods don't quite suit either of us, something we have in common.

Rachel Friedman

#8. Whispering voice inside my head growing louder, my voice - not those of my parents or teachers or Carly or Muriel, even - telling me to live my life without fear or worry or doubt that nothing was going according to plan, as though such a plan ever existed in the first place.

Rachel Friedman

#9. It's as difficult to describe the sea as it is a piece of music.

Rachel Friedman

#10. All along I've thought the best way to keep out all the voices in my head directing my life this way and that was to stay busy, to distract my brain from itself, but it's this profound silence that releases me from worry.

Rachel Friedman

#11. For as long as I can remember, I have disappointed her, so I have put a wall between us in an effort to protect myself.

Rachel Friedman

#12. Who you are when you are tested might not be pretty, but it's always real.

Rachel Friedman

#13. What I found on the road was a tiny piece of myself, the one I kept unknowingly shuttered for so long in order to play the many roles I thought were mine.

Rachel Friedman

#14. Even the homes we leave on purpose, the families we break away from to be ourselves or someone else, call us back again and again, to a place that has long since ceased to be home yet still holds power over us.

Rachel Friedman

#15. We are in love, in the very beginning part of it, when you don't ever want to separate your body from the other person's.

Rachel Friedman

#16. Writing has always been a way for me to make sense of the world, even if the most important changes happening to me abroad - many of which are imperceptible until years later - are nowhere to be found on those pages. My

Rachel Friedman

#17. That summer, maybe for the first time in my life, I existed wholly in the present moment, which is one of the liberating things about traveling to a place where no one knows you. I had no past or future, which suited me perfectly, since I did not wish to reckon with either.

Rachel Friedman

#18. Even with the coffee, I'm never fully awake, just jittery.

Rachel Friedman

#19. I've found it freeing these last few months to let go of some insecurities, large and small, or at least to put them on hold. One

Rachel Friedman

#20. Whenever you're traveling, you have these thoughts of home. At what point will you have been away so long that it will no longer be recognizable - or you won't be?

Rachel Friedman

#21. I imagine the people whose lives are most intertwined with mine, and I realize life has gone on without me. The planet has not imploded because I, the girl who has always done what is expected of her, decided not to, just this once.

Rachel Friedman

#22. She is confident and nonchalant in equal proportion to my paralyzing self-consciousness.

Rachel Friedman

#23. Should you do what you love, what's outrageous and unpredictable, and worry about the future later, or plug away at a steady job first and go off and have your fun when you retire? In

Rachel Friedman

#24. See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it,

Rachel Friedman

#25. Backpacking has noble ideals: to see how the locals live, to interact with them, to be respectful and blend in as much as possible. Backpackers want to learn, we want to understand the worlds we have entered, not simply consume them.

Rachel Friedman