Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whearas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over a period of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he felt most at home.

–Paul Bowles, from The Sheltering Sky