Love Quote by Richard Ernst

A “brief visit” doing the work of an origin story is a classic move, and Richard Ernst knows it. The line compresses a whole conversion narrative into a before-and-after: a scientist with a timetable and a passport walks into Nepal for a short stay and comes out with an “insatiable” appetite. That leap is the point. It’s not just travel as leisure; it’s travel as rerouting, a sudden expansion of what counts as knowledge.

The phrasing borrows the language of appetite to describe aesthetics, quietly legitimizing collecting and connoisseurship as a kind of hunger that can’t be reasoned away. “Insatiable” flatters the obsession while confessing its excess. Coming from a scientist, it also reads as a small rebellion against the stereotype of pure rationalism: the lab-trained mind is admitting to an irrational, enduring attachment. It’s an implicit argument that rigor and wonder are not opposites; the same curiosity that drives measurement can be hijacked by beauty.

Nepal is doing double duty here. It signals proximity to sacred art traditions and a Western encounter with “Asia” that is both personal and historically loaded. The subtext is that a single, intense encounter can authorize a lifetime of looking, acquiring, studying. It’s also a way of narrating cross-cultural fascination without having to name the messier questions of access, privilege, and the collector’s gaze. The sentence is clean, almost too clean, because it functions as a passport stamp for the soul: I was changed there, therefore my devotion now has a birthplace.