“To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.”

“Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake…when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.”

“Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.”

“Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.”

“Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a mussel leads to a crab or a curious stone, which leads to another thing and eventually leads back to mussels, which is another and perhaps a more far-reaching way to know mussels. The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is a like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once. One thing leads to another, and this is the treasure that always runs through your fingers and never runs out.”

“Reading these stories, it's tempting to think thatthe arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting,navigating, skills of survival and escape. Even in theeveryday world of the present, an anxiety to survivemanifests itself in cars and clothes for far more ruggedoccasions than those at hand, as though to express somesense of the toughness of things and of readiness to facethem. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival,seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's calledfor is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness todeal with what comes next. These captives lay out in astark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: thetransitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldomis it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something ofthis journey between the near and the far goes on inevery life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend,an old letter will remind you that you are not who youonce were, for the person who dwelt among them, valuedthis, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Withoutnoticing it you have traversed a great distance; thestrange has become familiar and the familiar if notstrange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrowngarment. And some people travel far more thanothers. There are those who receive as birthright an adequateor at least unquestioned sense of self and thosewho set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or forsatisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit valuesand practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have toburn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”

“Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.”