Quotes by Journalists - Page 145

If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.
Lionel Shriver
From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations.In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)
Christopher Kremmer
You can leave Hong Kong, but it will never leave you.
Nury Vittachi
There is nothing more exasperating than reading in contemporary guidebooks disparagements of places that are deemed to be "seedy." Do the writers not notice that such places are invariably crowded with people? When a neighborhood is described as "seedy" by some Lonely Planet prude, I immediately head there.
Lawrence Osborne
Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else.
Tahir Shah
The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.
Tahir Shah
...a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.
Michael Lewis
I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand.
Tahir Shah
There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.
Tahir Shah
As anyone who's ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed.
Tahir Shah
I had learned years ago never to give original documents to anyone if I could help it.
Tahir Shah
One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.
Tahir Shah
A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation
Tahir Shah
Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.
Tahir Shah
Somewhere nere Ogallala, about six hours into that majestic, maddening prairie, I realize that half an hour has passed since I've seen a vehicle in either direction.Oh, I think, as I finally see a pair of headlights draw nigh in the eastbound lane, so this must be where the West begins.
Lily Burana
I don't know how many years it was before I arrived at a formulated philosophy that the happiest thing to do, always, when visiting an individual or a country, is to admit, by word or manner, how much I'm finding there that my life had lacked hitherto
Clara E. Laughlin
The people of North America have little idea of religion, but they have strict public morality. The Latin people are without morality but they are highly religious.
Patrick Marnham
On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.
Tahir Shah
It was an awkward moment. We were burning down our host's house, a situation which any guest seeks to avoid.
Tahir Shah
In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm.
Tahir Shah
In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough.
Tahir Shah
A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.
Tahir Shah
You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.
A.A. Gill
For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which--we are told--a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome.
Lawrence Osborne
Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters.
Jan Wong
The desert doesn't care who you are, and neither does anyone or anything who lives in it.
Deanne Stillman
The great glory of travel, to me, is not just what I see that's new to me in countries visited, but that in almost every one of them I change from an outsider looking in to an insider looking out.
Clara E. Laughlin
The idea of my heart dancing with delight was far too good to pass up.
Tahir Shah
Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.
Tahir Shah
Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.
Tahir Shah
When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.
Frank Delaney
Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.
Elizabeth Drew
I know it's not strictly sex that accounts for my straying the motive usually attributed to men. I think it's just too tempting to have two lives rather than one. Some people think that too much travel begets infidelity: Separation and opportunity test the bonds of love. I think it's more likely that people who hate to make choices to settle on one thing or another are attracted to travel. Travel doesn't beget a double life. The appeal of the double life begets travel.
Elisabeth Eaves
London on your own actually seems more exotic than Egypt on a tour.
Laura Fraser
Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.
Tahir Shah
Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.
Mark Helprin
Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.
Amin Maalouf
Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.
Albert Camus
Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: 'Journeys to recover your future?'And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and willnever have.
Italo Calvino
Rule number one: wear loose clothing. No Problem. Rule number two: no alcohol for the next three days. Slight problem. I'll miss my evening glass of wine but figure I can go for three days without and compensate later.And the last rule: absolutely no coffee or tea or caffeine of any kind.Big problem. This rule hits me like a sucker punch and sure would have knocked me to the floor had I not been sitting there already. I'm eying the exits, plotting my escape. I knew enlightenment came at a price, but i had no idea the price was this steep. A sense of real panic sets in. How am I going to survive for the next seventy-two hours without a single cup of coffee?
Eric Weiner
‎I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.
Jon Ronson
I am looking for the people who have always been there, and belong to the places they live. The others I do not wish to see.
Norman Lewis
My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the whole earth.I have look'd for equals and lovers an found them ready for me in all lands,I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them
Walt Whitman
what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Italo Calvino
I suspected, however, that I wasn't homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.
Alice Steinbach
You thought too hard. Same with travel. You can't work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.
Gayle Forman
Personally I like going places where I don't speak the language, don't know anybody, don't know my way around and don't have any delusions that I'm in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.
Michael Mewshaw
The farther you go, however, the harder it is to return. The world has many edges, and it's easy to fall off.
Anderson Cooper
A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.
Ryszard Kapuściński
The common mistake that bullies make is assuming that because someone is nice that he or she is weak. Those traits have nothing to do with each other. In fact, it takes considerable strength and character to be a good person.
MaryElizabeth Williams
...it took me a lifetime of glimpses, but now I see you completely - did I tell you you're beautiful? so kind to animals, children and me...
John Geddes
The world was in terrible shape, and I'm glad we stood up and said what we believed; but a lot of the time we'd say these beautiful things about justice and fairness and equality, but we weren't so nice to each other. We'd be jealous and we'd gossip, and we'd be moody and difficult and rude and inconsiderate. Why do I say 'we'? I mean I would be all that-- and if at the time I ever came near to knowing what I'd become, I'd dodge, I'd duck, I'd go on the offensive: the terrible Wall Street bankers. Lots of them were terrible-- and so were lots of us.
Dorothy Day
He gives me a little shrug, like, of course, why else? And at this point, I really have no right to be surprised by people's capacity for kindness and generosity, but still, I am. I'm floored every time.
Gayle Forman
You never know the hurt others endure in this world behind the closed windows of their life, or the joy a simple act of kindness can bring.
Jennifer Skiff
The worst have scraped out the mantle of the best and wear it around as something real. It takes no genius to see that. But I moved to San Francisco because the masquerade of kindly gestures is, at least, kind. And it remains kind. And all the people who would sit back and comment on the garishness of the costumes, the hollowness of the dialogue, the lack of divine conviction, well, all those people are either dead or fifteen years old.
Jay Caspian Kang
Good is to be found neither in the sermons of religious teachers and prophets, nor in the teachings of sociologists and popular leaders, nor in the ethical systems of philosophers... And yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day's work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital 'G', there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother.The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium.
Vasily Grossman
My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning.Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
Vasily Grossman
This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart – before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of preachers, before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It is as simple as life itself. Even the teachings of Jesus deprived it of its strength.But, as I lost faith in good, I began to lose faith even in kindness. It seemed as beautiful and powerless as dew. What use was it if it was not contagious?How can one make a power of it without losing it, without turning it into a husk as the Church did? Kindness is powerful only while it is powerless. If Man tries to give it power, it dims, fades away, loses itself, vanishes.
Vasily Grossman
Why had he committed this terrible sin? Everything in the world was insignificant compared to what he had lost. Everything in the world is insignificant compared to the truth and purity of one small man – even the empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even science itself.Then he realized that it still wasn't too late. He still had the strength to lift up his head, to remain his mother's son.And he wasn't going to try to console himself or justify what he had done. He wanted this mean, cowardly act to stand all his life as a reproach; day and night it would be something to bring him back to himself. No, no, no! He didn't want to strive to be a hero – and then preen himself over his courage.Every hour, every day, year in, year out, he must struggle to be a man, struggle for his right to be pure and kind. He must do this with humility. And if it came to it, he mustn't be afraid even of death; even then he must remain a man.'Well then, we'll see,' he said to himself. 'Maybe I do have enough strength. Your strength, Mother...
Vasily Grossman
Without any warning, tears filled my eyes. No one had ever given me such a kind and thoughtful gift before. I pictured Will going into the shop, looking over the books, and then discovering the very one he knew I would love. I even pictured him watching as the clerk wrapped the volume in brown paper. I wondered if the clerk had tied the green bow on it or if Will had gone into a notion shop and chosen it himself. These were all small things, but kindness was built of small things.
Sharon Biggs Waller