Isabelle Eberhardt

Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.

A nomad I will remain for life, 
in love with distant and uncharted places.

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.

Crime, particularly among the poor and downtrodden, is often a last gesture of liberty.

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.