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61 " Most were just too scared to leave. They tolerated the daily drudgery of work because dealing with daily drudgery was easier than quitting and doing something truly scary: sailing into unknown waters in pursuit of a dream. "
― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom
62 " I could sense the slightest abridgment of my freedom like a princess who can feel the impression of a pea under forty featherbeds. I felt it when I was in romantic relationships. I felt it when I was given a gift. I felt it when someone held even the faintest influence over me. And when I felt it, I felt rage— "
63 " Because Sami had never had the chance to acquaint herself with the adventurous sensations her soul longed to nourish itself with, she'd seen little reason to go through the trouble of living. Comfort and security, it seems, when overprescribed, can be poisons to the soul -- an illness that no amount of love can cure, freedom being the only antidote. "
64 " Joyce said, ‘When the soul of a man is born… there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. "
65 " As a country, we take out loans and go to school. We take out loans and buy a car. We take out loans and buy a home. It’s not always that we simply “want” these things. Rather, it’s often the case that we use our obligations as confirmations that “we’re doing something.” If we have things to pay for, we need a job. If we have a job, we need a car. If we have such things, we have a life, albeit an ordinary and monotonous life, but a life no less. If we have debt, we have a goal—we have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Debt narrows our options. It gives us a good reason to stick it out at a job, sink into sofas, and savor the comforts of the status quo. Debt is sought so we have a game to play, a battle to fight, a mythology to live out. It gives us a script to read, rules to abide by, instructions to follow. And when we see someone who doesn’t play by our rules—someone who’s spurned the comforts of hearth and home—we shift in our chairs and call him or her crazy. We feel a fury for the hobo and the hitchhiker, the hippie and gypsy, the vagrant and nomad—not because we have any reason to believe these people will do us any harm, but because they make us feel uncomfortable. They remind us of the inner longings we’ve squelched, the hero or heroine we’ve buried beneath a houseful of junk, the spirit we’ve exorcised out of ourselves so we could remain with our feet on the ground, stable and secure. "
66 " I felt a strange twinge of anger looking at the stars. It was as if I’d just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it wasn’t for Alaska, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what a real sky was supposed to look like, which made me wonder: If I’d gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view? "
67 " I graduated on a May afternoon. When the director of ceremonies ended her speech, I had no desire to triumphantly fling my graduation cap into the air as a gesture of my newfound freedom. There was nothing liberating about leaving college: I’d ended one series of obligations only to enter into another. I looked with fear and uncertainty at the long road ahead. "
68 " When it comes to memories, it seems we all have an editor within who will—if it’ll make for a good story—revise the senseless into symbols, or rephrase miseries into warm memories. "
69 " Robert Service put it – need something more than what conventional life offers. "
― Ken Ilgunas , The McCandless Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Magic Bus of the Stampede Trail
70 " I am a member of the “career-less generation.” Or the “screwed generation.” Unlike previous generations, the members of my generation won’t get jobs and respectable wages straight out of high school, let alone college. We don’t have the means to buy homes and start families in our twenties. We’re the first generation in a while who will be less well off and less secure than their parents’. "
71 " The trouble with Eichmann,” the Arendt quote read, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, [but] that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. "