Ellen Burstyn Quotes

I think traveling made me who I am. When I was 16, I was an exchange student in England, and that was the year that I kind of feel like I was on the road going one direction in life, and it just kind of shifted me over, and I finished high school, and I went traveling for three more years instead of going to college.

I didn't go to Latin America thinking, 'I'm gonna write a book. This is what I'm gonna do.' I went there to work for UNICEF and to learn.

After college, I drove across the country twice with friends. It was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life. I find it really inspiring seeing the country that way.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

I didn't do very well when I was at school, so my dad gave me the opportunity to travel in Africa. I drove from London to Nairobi. It was incredible.

And then a great thing in my life was going to India.

I used to dress like an eight-year-old boy. Traveling has inspired me to be more experimental.

Thailand was the transforming experience in my life. Thailand is where I grew up.

Every time I sit down to reread 'War and Peace' - I've read it three times - I feel as though I've lived another life.

At 18, I took a Greyhound bus to New York City, and then I was in city after city, so I was just dying to get to the country. Everywhere I'd go, I'd just shoot out to a national park somewhere and reconnect.

My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?' And writing was that for me.

Traveling changes you as a person. If you buy something, it's so different than if you put your money into traveling.

So basketball has always taken me places that I could have never imagined.

I arrived in Bangkok in 1980: I was 23 years old, and it changed my life.

Without New York, I wouldn't be the person I am today.

The only dream I ever had was the dream of New York itself, and for me, from the minute I touched down in this city, that was enough. It became the best teacher I ever had.

People always ask me, when I had the idea for TOMS, did it change my life? As romantic and noble as it is, no it did not change my life. But when I went to Argentina on that first shoe-drop, it did change my life.

The value of travel is not just the travel but what the travel makes of you.

Without travel I would have wound up a little ignorant white Southern female, which was not my idea of a good life.

India always changes people, and I have been no exception

Sometimes, the most profound of awakenings come wrapped in the quietest of moments.

Something had changed in me, even if I didn't know what it was just yet. All I could think was that I felt alive for the first time.

Asking the questions - that's what changes lives. Every cell in your body is awake with inquiry. And you cannot believe the old thoughts again.

Bill Gates'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

When I went to Africa I think that was when I really found a way to deal with what I had recently discovered; in two-dimensional terms, at least.