Drive Through the Night Quotes

“Not a road long enough
to outrun the dawn.

Let the sun rise.
I am ready.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“I wasn’t empty because others abandoned me, but because I had abandoned myself.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“I wasn’t empty because I was abandoned by others, but because I had abandoned myself. Who I am was repressed—collateral damage in a longterm coping mechanism gone unchecked. My subconscious had put up partitions to contain the flood of emotion in the wake of trauma but in doing so my identity was trapped and locked away as well. Everything that is repressed would one day come forward­—without warning, without control, and without a shutoff valve.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“As a result of being propagated into a toxic way of life, the act of breaking from that life has been a rite of passage taken by those who wish to listen deep for their authentic self.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“There is freedom in the destruction.
...all you have to do is survive it.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“Be gentle, Long Night
I don’t belong here.
Thrown to the wolves,
I shifted nocturnal.

Arced up,
surrendered to
the glowing drum
of the full moon,
hear my cry.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“Shame be damned—own the ruin of yourself.
Wear the failure like a vintage coat
—torn, tattered heart—
you are a worn out classic,
a soul of arcane salt and grit.

Outcast,
iconoclast,
standfast.
Beyond the black and white blah of buttondown norm
we clash and crash
in the candle-lit dusk
of conscious dreams and darkest desires”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“I’m a spiritual mutt. The road is my church. It was on the road that I discovered the landscape god. My journals tell of the perpetual midnight mass held on the highways and byways of the American West. Every so often, climbing out of the driver’s seat with a journal and a camera, seeking the sacrament of the wild silence found in the unsullied sanctuaries of intact wilderness.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“The quality of silence in my life speaks to the health of my soul/mind. If the silence is deafening, suppressive, terrifying...
(it speaks to a fever raging silently in the psyche because the life I am living doesn’t align with your core values and/or the presence of something or someone harmful.)

This quality of silence holds within it the unfelt, the unsaid, the unspeakable, the unrecognized, the unhealed, the unreconciled, the unconscionable...in addressing what lives in the silence and learning how to tolerate it—just sit with it—we begin the work that need be done to integrate the parts of ourselves sequestered into suppression.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“The end of the road
is the beginning
of the wild unknown.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“Hope is a thing with feather,  
but does it know how to fly?”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“I wasn’t empty because others abandoned me, but because I had abandoned myself. Who I am was repressed—collateral damage in a long-term coping mechanism gone unchecked. My subconscious had put up partitions to contain the flood of emotion in the wake of trauma, but in doing so, my identity was trapped and locked away as well. As a result, everything repressed would one day come forward—without warning, without control, and without a shutoff valve.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“Are you there?
I thought I felt you brush past me
while in-between dream and waking.
Are you the echo of light from a star long dead
or are you True North?”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“There are times
when all I can take in
lies between my headlights.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“You broke me,
but I am still wild.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“For a moment let it be.
For a moment love it as-is.
For a moment hold it
then leave it along the roadside.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“Burn it down, dear one
—burn it all down.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“Love is a binding
—a blinding;
—the one madness
absent from the D.S.M.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“You ended one life, but I got another in me.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“Adrift in the endless night,
I’ve wished on the stars far-flung
not knowing each spec of light
was the dust of my own dreams
shattered in another life
—embedded in the horizon
in the blast wave that shattered me
into the mosaic of a
melancholic,
alcoholic
dreamer
drunk
on this insatiable yearning
to connect with another
because I can’t find myself.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“The bar at rock bottom, and you had to walk through
the door.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“These poems are echoes from the time of breakdown and breakthrough—scribbled in the gap between the lightning and the thunder as I counted the seconds . . . .”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“Survival is balance. Life’s ugliness is balanced by beauty. Trauma is balanced by awe. For me, being on the road has come to represent awe-seeking—what I find in the still-wild places is counterbalance to the traumas.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night