Vivian Swift Quotes

Calamities are unavoidable, in love and travel.

All it takes to make it to the end of the road are some good Survival Tips.

They were as unexpected as a mirage, those dancers on the Pont des Arts. Strictly speaking, the bridge is for pedestrians only, but waltzing is allowed on special nights like this. A guitar, a violin, an accordian -- a tune everyone knows -- and the dancers begin to twirl, spin, soar and glide all around us, in love with life at 3/4 time.



Did I say waltzing was allowed?


Under these circumstances, it's mandatory.

Now is the time of fresh starts
This is the season that makes everything new.
There is a longstanding rumor that Spring is the time
of renewal, but that's only if you ignore the depressing
clutter and din of the season. All that flowering
and budding and birthing--- the messy youthfulness
of Spring actually verges on squalor. Spring is too busy,
too full of itself, too much like a 20-year-old to be the best time for reflection, re-grouping, and starting fresh.
For that you need December. You need to have lived
through the mindless biological imperatives of your life (to bud, and flower, and show off) before you can see that a landscape of new fallen snow is THE REAL YOU.
December has the clarity, the simplicity, and the silence you need for the best FRESH START of your life.

The Blues
The Blahs
The Weary Dismals
Lost in Gloom
Woesome Me's
The Eternal 3 AM of the Soul.

The French abhor drafts. They do not like the feel of the courant d'air , which is why they do not take it kindly when a foreigner opens a window on a train or a bus, which is probably why all the windows on the bus to Giverny were locked. Never think that, when you let in some fresh air in France, the natives won't hate you for it.

To see a tree in Winter is to see it for what it really is. A Winter tree is an object so intricate and so perplexing that if it hadn't already; been decided that Winter trees were plain and boring, we would be spending hours pondering them, staring at them in astonishment.

NEXT LIFE. My embroidery studio on the main street of Bayeux will be just one part of my Institute of Slow Information. I will also teach letter writing, listening, miniature portrait painting, and the art of doing one thing at a time.

There ought to be a word for the Winter form of a tree.

Some days 'staying put' might feel the same as Going Nowhere.
Make a cup of tea, and wait for that feeling to pass.

There's a fortune of Authentic Vintage French Linen Tea Towels on every clothes line. These are the exact kind of linens that specialty shops in America sell for top dollar to affluent customers who pay dearly to add that touch of French Farmhouse Fabulousness to their million-dollar McMansions.


Flaubert is so wrong.

Even wash day in Normandy is achingly chic.

I am acutely aware that I am now the middle-aged traveler that I used to consider to lame, so embarrassing. And I have something to say to my 20-year-old self:

You cannot possibly know how much time it takes to learn to treasure this world, how many years it takes to properly cherish your place in it.

As you age, you will find it more and more remarkable, a miracle really, that any of us -- you, me -- are here at all, the result of an undeserved, infinite gift.

And the older you get, the more you know how much you will miss all this when you are gone.

In the end, the world was not all that changed by your coming, you were not all that crucial to it. But the world, this world, which you will one day travel in homage and gratitude, this world was everything to you.

This is not my first road trip and it's not my first marriage either. I know that my hissy fit in Fougeres and our bad luck on the road to Bordeaux does not spell doom for either our love affair or our journey. Love affairs are like road trips, and road trips are like love affairs -- from beginning to end the emotions are equally intense, the phases just as predictable. Love and travel. They both have their ups and downs.

In America, being able to get things done, especially if it's by bending rules, making exceptions, or calling in a favor, is the way to show power. In France, being able to say non (especially to a bureaucratically legitimate request) is the way to show power. And piss me off.

Romance is showing my new husband the places and things that mean the most to me.


I can't help it if some of those places and things are in France.

Celebrate my heart, at ease or on fire, in my usual featherbrained way.

Horace, Roman Poet
Ode I-6, 23 BCE

Travel Tip: Relax. It's not a crime to want to sit in a cafe and not take a walking our of all those historic monuments in your peripheral vision.

POOR MARCH
It is the HOMELIEST month of the year. Most of it is MUD, Every Imaginable Form of MUD, and what isn't MUD in March is ugly late-season SNOW falling onto the ground in filthy muddy heaps that look like PILES of DIRTY LAUNDRY.

If you happen to be a person who does not enjoy your own company, a visit to Edinburgh in January will teach you how it's done.

Travel Tip: The term is in situ -- in the place of origin. We travel to put ourselves in situ , in a place where we belong. The feeling that one was born in the wrong place is an ancient an universal experience, such that I suspect (a) it is part of our human DNA; and (b) is why our kind are born wanderers. We travel to find the place where we can recognize ourselves for once. Be on the lookout for that jolt of unexpected familiarity in a foreign land: that's how you'll know you are in situ .

If gardens are created to tell stories, which I believe they are, then garden gates are the crucial opening lines that can make or break a tale.

As a rule, romance is not a place you can find on a map. But sometimes it is.

X and Y
the Co-ordinates of
Zen Navigation

X = the limited time you have on the road, in a life
Y = the eternity you have in every hour, every day
Z = Each step you take is a once-in-a-lifetime infinite thing