Daily Inspiration Quote by Judith Guest

Travel is supposed to expand you; Judith Guest admits it also scrambles you. The line works because it refuses the tidy self-improvement narrative we sell about movement and novelty. On “these trips,” she “read[s] like mad” not out of leisure but out of need, as if books are a portable spine. The verb choice is telling: “center me” is spiritual language smuggled into an everyday habit. Reading becomes a private ritual that counteracts the disorientation of airports, hotel rooms, and small talk with strangers who only know your “trip self.”

Then Guest flips the blade: reading helps her remember who she is, “Or forgetting who I am!” That pivot is the quote’s real engine. It captures the paradox at the heart of fiction: we read to locate ourselves, but we also read to escape the constant administrative labor of being a self. The exclamation point isn’t just perkiness; it’s a wink at the relief of dissolution. Identity here isn’t a treasured core so much as a noisy room you sometimes want to step out of.

As a novelist, Guest is also quietly defending her craft. In unfamiliar places, experience can become performative, a stream of impressions you’re expected to convert into anecdotes. Reading is the refusal of that demand. It’s a way to stay interior, to choose someone else’s sentences over your own forced narrative. The subtext is that “centering” isn’t always self-assertion; sometimes it’s self-suspension, letting another mind hold you steady for a while.