There's nothing quite like a good quest for getting your blood pumping.

A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you.

Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.

Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home?

I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.

Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.

In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm.

There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.

The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.

When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.

[T]hrough bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.

Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.

You have to die a little inside to be reborn as a Stronger & Wiser version of yourself.

I have been quite put out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.

I have auditory hallucinations, I hear voices saying derogatory things, like I'm terrible and I'm going to die, and they're usually worse in the afternoon.

I always say, or have said in the past, that ninety-nine and forty-four-hundredths of the audience does not pay any attention to the lighting, but one hundred percent is affected by it.

Congress's definition of torture in those laws - the infliction of severe mental or physical pain - leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation.

The Light in you is the unalterable truth of who you are. You can deny it and obscure it, but you cannot uncreate it.

Looking into another person's eyes for an extended period of time proved to be a powerful thing. And if you don't believe me, try it yourself.

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.