“I arrived at Dover... Well-intentioned people had warned the customs authorities of my arrival and of the nature of the effects I brought with me; so my trunks were emptied...and each thing they contained was unfolded and scrutinized with the most minute exactitude.”

“The Egyptian officers informed me that I would be denied entry, and I was soon deported back to Yemen on the same plane on which I had arrived. The authorities gave me no clear answer why: They said that I knew the reason for my deportation better than them, and that my name had been blacklisted based on the request of a security body.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

“I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”
Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian

“So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

“I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

“Once there arrived in Delhi some female infidel captives, ten of whom the Vazir sent to me. I gave one of them to the man who had brought them… My companion took three young girls, and I do not know what happened to the rest.”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

“I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

“I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

“Beyond myself, somewhere,
I wait for my arrival.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

“I was writing to my wife when your letter arrived, and now I want to look at her portrait myself, seeing the great beauty it contains. I am such a devoted husband that other beautiful women now do nothing for me.”

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500–1558) Holy Roman Emperor