Wanderess Quotes

“She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.”
― Roman Payne

“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.”
― Roman Payne

“Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a 'wanderess.' Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences - whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the same to her.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She never cried because she was afraid that something 'would' happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, 'would not' happen.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“There's only one place I want to go and it's to all the places I've never been.”
― Nikki rowe

“Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess
When did you feel your
most euphoric kiss?
Was I the source
of your greatest bliss?”
― Roman Payne

“In my errant life I roamed
To learn the secrets of women and men,
Of gods and dreams.
I've known all the countries of our world,
I've lived a thousand lives:
Many lives I lived in love,
Other lives I squandered.
For in my life I never traveled,
All I did was wander.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“The day came when she discovered sex, sensuality, and literature; she said, 'I submit! Let my life be henceforth ruled by poetry. Let me reign as the queen of my dreams until I become nothing less than the heroine of God.”
― Roman Payne

“When a Wanderess has been caged,
or perched with her wings clipped,
She lives like a Stoic,
She lives most heroic,
smiling with ruby, moistened lips
once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.”
― Roman Payne

“Opium: that terrible truth serum. Dark secrets guarded for a lifetime can be divulged with carefree folly after a sip of the black smoke.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy-girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death... And they should! ...For they are in life.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“I knew that I never wanted to stop walking; I wanted to see places and somehow understand what this thing called earth was all about. There were so many people out there, and I had to meet them. I felt safe and at home on the roads to nowhere, I felt welcome and protected in the unknown land and I fell in love with the people around me. They were so very similar and still so very different from me. I felt their souls connect to my own, and I knew no greater feeling could ever be given to me.”
― Meara O'Hara, The Wanderess and her Suitcase

“One thing was certain: life was a maze. There was nothing “straight forward”. Everything that pretended to be straight somehow ended in unexpected twists and turns, only to leave you full of wonder at how you possibly made it through to the end. You couldn’t just pack a pair of hedge trimmers to take a shortcut and hoodwink fate. No, you had to walk the path of life given to you with all its detours. The goal wasn’t to avoid getting lost sometimes—in fact, that was most unlikely given that you were in a maze. The trick was simply to keep walking. To enjoy the process of getting lost and finding yourself again, different and more grown-up than when you had left. One step after another, that was all that it took. One step after another, so simple and so utterly enough.”
― Meara O'Hara, The Wanderess and her Suitcase

“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city. (by Roman Payne, from “The Wanderess.”

How this quote became so popular, I have no idea. I wrote it about one woman: The heroine of “The Wanderess,” Saskia; yet I wrote these lines to describe Saskia at her best—praising the qualities of a heroine that all women should strive to have, or keep if they have them. I wrote these lines to make Saskia be like a statue of Psyche or Demeter. The masculine sculptor doesn’t see rock when he carves Aphrodite. He sees before him the carving of the perfect feminine creature.

I was creating my ‘perfect feminine creature’ when I wrote about Saskia. She is completely wild and fearless in her dramatic performance of life. She knows that she may only have one life to live and that most people in her society wish to see her fail in her dream of living a fulfilled life. For if a woman acts and lives exactly as society wants her to live, she will never be truly happy, never fulfilled. For societies do not want girls and women to wander.

I am surprised that this quote became so famous, since I didn’t spend more than a few seconds writing it. It was written merely as three sentences in a novel. I didn’t write it to be a solitary poem. This quote that touches so many people is no more than an arrangement of twenty-four words in a book of three-hundred pages.
What touches me the most is when fans send me photos of tattoos they’ve had done of this quote—either a few words from it or the whole quote. The fact that these wonderful souls are willing to guard words that I’ve written on their precious skin for the rest of their lives makes me feel that what I am writing is worth something and not nothing. When I get depressed and feel the despair that haunts me from time to time, and cripples me, I look at these photos of these tattoos, and it helps me to think that what I am doing is important to some people, and it helps me to start writing again.
Am I a masculine version of the wanderess in this quote? Of course I am! I am wild and fearless, I am a wanderer who belongs to no city and to nobody; I am a drop of free water. I am—to cite one of my other quotes—“free as a bird. King of the world and laughing!”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“We can’t conquer the things that are bigger than ourselves; we can’t even escape them. It is the wind that decides our destination, far more than ourselves. All that we are able to do is pack our bags, hop on board, raise the anchor and set the sails. We can only trust the wind and go on and on.”
― Meara O'Hara, The Wanderess and her Suitcase

“There was a memory of how beautiful, how wild, how colourful, how adventurous and how wonderful this big world was.”
― Meara O'Hara, The Wanderess and her Suitcase

“One learns most when one wanders the world.”
― Tamuna Tsertsvadze, Notes of Oisin: From an Irish Monk to a Skaldic Poet

“I left something behind in the heat and the vastness of this continent, and I was reborn as something I knew I had always been: a wanderess.”
― Meara O'Hara, The Wanderess and her Suitcase

“We lay in each other's arms, rescuing each other from drowning. Each of us needed the other more than we were able to say. On this very odd night, the world could have gone down, and we would have been okay.”
― Meara O'Hara, The Wanderess and her Suitcase

“To make your life a work of wonder
go into the night and wander;
penetrate the world asunder,
to find your fate in someplace fonder.”
― Roman Payne, Wanderess Quotes and Other Poems

“I knew then that this hug had been the greatest teacher of my young life.”
― Meara O'Hara, The Wanderess and her Suitcase

“Nothing would ever be the same after I had been hurt so deeply, but to still have the courage to love—that was real bravery, the bravery people talked about in stories and tales.”
― Meara O'Hara, The Wanderess and her Suitcase

“We don’t know what’s coming next, but we can go to it with purpose. We can go to it dancing.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“Remember: this is not a guidebook, it is a map. Wander at your whimsy.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“Aimlessness isn’t purposelessness. Not to me. Aimlessness isn’t meaningless. Quite the contrary. Aimlessness isn’t absence from life, it is full-bodied presence in it. To wander aimlessly is to move through the world without the conceit that we actually know what is coming next. That is, to move through the world with grace.”
― Toby Israel, Vagabondess: A Guide to Solo Female Travel

“Go and see for yourself. Trust your intuition. It will lead you to purpose and direction. Trust your path. Trust your process.

Discover that everyone is wrong—including you!”
― Toby Israel