Mary Chapin Carpenter Quotes

Anyone who spends time on the road knows there's something special about being in the middle of Utah or Nebraska - you sit with it, and there's a peace about it. You can go left or right, and it opens up all kinds of doors. You take your own path.

I left home at 17 and I've been on the road ever since.

When I was 19 years old, I hitchhiked across the country to San Francisco.

Not all those who wander are lost.

If you think about America, it is about getting your backpack on and heading out.

When you're around kids you can be a little kid yourself and pretend that life is magic and you don't have to be one of those sweaty people going to work every day.

Someday girl, I don't know when, were gonna get to the place where we really want to go, and we'll walk in the sun. But til then, tramps like us, baby, we were born to run.

Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.

Out on the roads there is fitness and self-discovery and the persons we were destined to be.

I followed those highway signs and I've run down those thin white lines.

If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.

Travel is never a matter of money but of courage. I spent a large part of my youth traveling the world as a hippie. And what money did I have then? None. I barely had enough to pay for my fare. But I still consider those to have been the best years of my youth. The great lessons I learned has been precisely those that my journeys had taught me.

There are no wrong roads to anywhere.

The bridge will only take you halfway there, to those mysterious lands you long to see. Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fair, and moonlit woods where unicorns run free. So come and walk awhile with me and share the twisting trails and wondrous worlds I've known. But this bridge will only take you halfway there. The last few steps you have to take alone.

When you’re young you just run, but you come back to what you need.

It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.

Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain, And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.

It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn't have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

Never did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much as in the journeys I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am still; my body must be in motion to move my mind.

She knows where she's going, and what she has to do. She could, after all, find her way to Route 95 South blindfolded. She could do it in the dark, in fair weather or foul; she can do it even when it seems she will run out of gas. It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.