Lavinia Spalding author of Writing Away

A condensed list of Lavinia's favorite quotes in connection with her passion for travelling and writing...

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
–Mark Twain

The world is a great book, of which they who never stir from home read only one page.
–St. Augustine

Writing has been a way of explaining to myself the things I do not understand.
–Rosario Castellanos

I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.
–Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Theresa, Leondardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
-H. Jackson Brown

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
- Albert Einstein

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
–George Santayana

The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
-Chinese Proverb

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
– E. L. Doctorow

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
-Charles Kingsley

About the Author

Lavinia grew up in the small towns of Kensington, New Hampshire and Flagstaff, Arizona, where she spent her bohemian childhood climbing trees, writing poetry, and playing the classical guitar. She attended the University of Arizona Creative Writing program and upon graduating, immediately took a job teaching English in Busan, South Korea. It was an impulsive decision that changed the course of her life, turning it irreversibly nomadic. She lived in Korea for six years, and has traipsed through some thirty countries on five continents, a blank notebook and a clutch of pens her constant companions.

Although her inextinguishable wanderlust prevents her from ever really staying put, Lavinia currently lives in San Francisco and can always be found at www.laviniaspalding.com.

Lavinia Spalding is author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler and With a Measure of Grace, the Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant. She is a regular contributor to Yoga Journal, and her work has appeared in such publications as Sunset Magazine, Post Road, CitySmart, and Inkwell.