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If you are anything like me, you wake up some mornings seriously craving the hum of tires on an open road and the buzz of airport terminals and the feeling of butterflies in your stomach as you embark upon an unknown adventure.

Some days this addiction to movement makes me want to crawl out of my skin; it is almost impossible to quell without taking drastic measures that usually involve spontaneous plane tickets.

One of the best cures I’ve found is to read.

I allow myself hours of sitting, curled up, in the travel section of the bookstore—my nose buried in guide books and adventure literature, my head spinning with the names of places I have yet to visit and languages I have yet to learn.

These are three of my favorite quotes that evoke the traveler’s spirit and remind me to breathe, because surely the next adventure is just around the corner:

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves: and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

~ Pico Iyer

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you–beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”

~ Edward Abbey

“Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.”

~ Tom Robbins

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