Ken Ilgunas > Quotes

“Perhaps there’s no better act of simplification than climbing a mountain. For an afternoon, a day, or a week, it’s a way of reducing a complicated life into a simple goal. All you have to do is take one step at a time, place one foot in front of the other, and refuse to turn back until you’ve given everything you have.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“It was strange how it was always the poor who picked us up [hitchhiking]...They dwelled beneath poverty lines and were undereducated, but they were...more civilized than the finely bred..for there is no demographic that has a sharper instinct for empathy than the downtrodden.”
― Ken Ilgunas

“We need so little to be happy. Happiness does not come from things. Happiness comes from living a full and exciting life.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“... But these skeptics are only selectively skeptical. They think themselves enlightened for resisting all this new proof and remaining steadfast in mistrusting anything that someone else says. But it is a false enlightenment to accept only those ideas that align with one's worldview and reject those that don't.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland

“Discomforts are only discomforting when they’re an unexpected inconvenience, an unusual annoyance, an unplanned-for irritant. Discomforts are only discomforting when we aren’t used to them. But when we deal with the same discomforts every day, they become expected and part of the routine, and we are no longer afflicted with them the way we were. We forget to think about them like the daily disturbances of going to the bathroom, or brushing our teeth, or listening to noisy street traffic. Give your body the chance to harden, your blood to thicken, and your skin to toughen, and you’ll find that the human body carries with it a weightless wardrobe. When we’re hardy in mind and body, we can select from an array of outfits to comfortably bear most any climate.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“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.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“On this voyage, I couldn't help but think we need need. We need to be forced to go outside. We need to be forced to depend on one another. we need to be forced to sacrifice, to grow a garden, to fix a rood, to interact with neighbors. Nature has been all around me as a boy. It unleashed terrifying storms, spun circular cycles, inflicted bone-chilling, cold and renewed itself with springy revivifications. Yet I was completely oblivious to it all. I was playing video games.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“I thought of a Saint Francis of Assisi quote. He said, “He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“Real poverty has little to do with being broke. Real poverty is not being able to change your circumstances”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“On a hike, the days pass with the wind, the sun, the stars; movement is powered by a belly full of food and water, not a noxious tankful of fossil fuels. On a hike, you're less a job title and more a human being....A periodic hike not only stretches the limbs but also reminds us: Wow, there's a big old world out there.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland

“Envy is a bitter fruit, but one that only grows when we water it with the nourishment of society. Remove society, and it will wither on the vine.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“Why should I listen to society? Society—as far as I was concerned—was insane. To me, society was boob jobs and sweaters on dogs and environmental devastation of incalculable proportions. We do not listen to the lunatic on the city corner who screeches every day about how the world is going to end, so why should I stop and let society shout nonsense in my ears? These”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“George Orwell’s dilemma in Down and Out in Paris and London came to mind. Orwell was living as a poor dishwasher in Paris and was chronically worried about the day he’d finally go broke. But on the day he went broke, he discovered he no longer had anything to worry about. Now he just had something to deal with.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland

“The battle over climate change, I thought, like the battle over civil rights, will not be won by convincing disbelievers of facts or appealing to their morality but by passing the torch of reason down to the generations to come, who will replace and laugh at us all.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland

“When your life is all toil and hardship, the things that matter and the bullshit that doesn’t become easy to separate.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“Life is simpler when we feel controlled. When we tell ourselves that we are controlled, we can shift the responsibility of freeing ourselves onto that which controls us. When we do that, we don’t have to bear the responsibility of our unhappiness or shoulder the burden of self-ownership. We don’t have to do anything. And nothing will ever change.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“Like us, many students had spent their years in college thinking they’d get that well-paying, planet-saving job, even if they’d heard horror stories from recent underemployed grads. Those jobs, of course, no longer exist (if they ever did). By 2009, 17.4 million college graduates had jobs that didn’t even require a degree. There are 365,000 cashiers and 318,000 waiters and waitresses in America who have bachelor’s degrees, as do one-fifth of those working in the retail industry. More than 100,000 college graduates are janitors and 18,000 push carts. (There are 5,057 janitors in the United States who have doctorates and professional degrees!)”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“I wonder what Thoreau would have done...[H}is greatest story, I thought, was his life. He knew that anything is possible when you wield the pen and claim your life as your own. But the truth is so few have the privilege to write their own stories. People are born into poverty without a hope of redemption. Children are abused and damaged. Disease and war and famine and a million other things prevent them from wielding the pen. But for those of us who can, should it not be our great privilege to live the lives we've imagined? To be who we want to be? To go on our own great journeys and share our experiences with others?”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“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’. Strangely, I seemed more okay with this than my parents. Not being able to afford an above-ground swimming pool and a kid wasn’t some heartbreaking tragedy to me.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“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? We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“In the arctic, seasons do not melt peaceably into one another as they do in other climes, giving each other handshakes, fond farewells, and see-ya-next-years. In the arctic, winter stands like a barbarian horde on the edge of town one day and ravages it the next. Winter moves in without warning, grabs summer by the belt loops of its cutoffs, and throws it out the door.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“freedom was simply being able to entertain the prospect of changing your circumstances.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“Stare—really stare—into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation. When you see the aurora, the only logical choice you can make is to spend the rest of your life seeking the sublime.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“I no longer wished to have a diluted life, made faint by living according to the norms and values of an older generation who’d forgotten what it felt like to have the impassioned representatives of soul and spirit lobby their vessel with an unrelenting persistence to take them on an adventure.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“In the 1930s, Americans hopped trains. In the 1950s, beat poets wrote about road trips. In the 1960s, we hitched rides. Today, however, it seems like the whole “coming of age” adventure has been abridged from a young person’s life experience, leaving no gap, no bridge, no moment of real freedom in between school and career. I”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“Sometimes I wished for the temperature to be warmer, but why live in a chronic state of want, constantly hoping for heat in winter and cold in summer?”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“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.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“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.”
― Ken Ilgunas, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“We have trains to hop, voyages to embark on, and rides to hitch. And then there’s the great American wild—vanishing but still there—ready to impart its wisdom from an Alaskan peak or a patch of grass growing in a crack of a city sidewalk. And no matter how much sprawl and civilization overtake our wilds, we’ll always have the boundless wildlands in ourselves to explore.”
― Ken Ilgunas