Quotes by Travel Writers

In life, I regret the things I didn't do far more than the missteps I made along the way.
David Stanley
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.
Freya Stark
All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand- any dog child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.
Freya Stark
Style is something peculiar to one person it expresses one personality and one only it cannot be shared.
Freya Stark
I have taught you my dear flock for above thirty years how to live and I will show you in a very short time how to die.
George Sandys
Time is the sea in which men grow are born or die.
Freya Stark
I have taught you my dear flock for above thirty years how to live and I will show you in a very short time how to die.
George Sandys
Time is the sea in which men grow are born or die.
Freya Stark
Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
Freya Stark
Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.
George Norman Douglas
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
Freya Stark
Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove to condemn-the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.
Freya Stark
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life and to do it rightly is an art like any other.
Freya Stark
All our acts have sacramental possibilities.
Freya Stark
The wisest person is not the one who has the fewest failures but the one who turns failures to best account.
Richard R. Grant
Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins become fetters if they cannot alter.
Freya Stark
The most ominous of fallacies: the belief that things can be kept static by inaction.
Freya Stark
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
George Norman Douglas
In India even the most mundane inquiries have a habit of ending this way. There may be two answers, there may be five, a dozen or a hundred; the only thing that is certain is that all will be different.
Eric Newby
...it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map.¨
Paul Theroux
Either you like cats or you don't. Whole nations have been divided on what people thought of an animal that mates openly, walks in silence and keeps its own counsel.
John Hillaby
At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
Paul Theroux
What a fucking gorgeous night!
Kirsten Hubbard
As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again.
Paul Theroux
I just had to find the courage to take that first step.
Kirsten Hubbard
We’re both made of stars, Jory Birch. Everybody is.
Kirsten Hubbard
Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.
Bruce Chatwin
Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us.
Robert Byron
You know, kid, ethics isn't about choosing between right and wrong; it's about choosing between grey and grey. It's about choosing between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive courses of action. Freedom or security? Courage or comfort? Self-examination or blissful happiness? Column A or Column B?
Will Ferguson
If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.
Bruce Chatwin
Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.
Paul Theroux
Be fanatically positive and militantly optimistic. If something is not to your liking, change your liking.
Rick Steves
Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.
Bruce Chatwin
Last days? Don't they know? These are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.
Paul Theroux
Impulsive isn’t something you choose. It’s something youare.
Kirsten Hubbard
A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.
Tim Cahill
All good knights, pilgrims, sons in search of fortune, seekers after truth, and plain ordinary fools, turn towards the city they have left and take farewell according to their nature. This is a full moment in all journeying, the time when girths are tightened in preparation for the miles that lie ahead.
H.V. Morton
A journey is a fragment of Hell.
Bruce Chatwin
The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.
Paul Theroux
I gave way to a wave of home-sickness that almost shames me now when I recollect it. I find it impossible in cold blood, and at this distance, to put into words the longing that shook me. I have forgotten the pain in the neck, but never will I forget the pain in my heart.
H.V. Morton
Government observers, keen on getting the Penan out of the valuable hardwood forests, have claimed that Penan health is poor and that they are malnourished. This is a ploy to get them settled so they can be controlled. Also, it is a source of embarrassment to the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia that in the 1980s, nomadic hunters are still roaming the jungles. This doesn't help the national image of a modern, developing country.
Eric Hansen
Eyes glazed over as the great rice-wine parties in the highlands were recalled, parties that are no longer held since the arrival of the mission. Bario has become a good, clean, upstanding, sober, hard-working Christian community. What a loss for these fun-loving and generous people.
Eric Hansen
Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.
Eric Hansen
If I Am murdered en route it will have been well worth while!
Dervla Murphy
If you enjoy sticking a straw in a dog's ear, don't sit next to the pooch with a milkshake.
Alan Rogers
I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.
Paul Theroux
Human nature, at its best, had always been based on a deep heroic restlessness, on wanting something--something else, something more, whether it be true love or a glimpse just beyond the horizon. It was the promise of happiness, not the attainment of it, that had driven the entire engine, the folly and glory of who we are.
Will Ferguson
Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.
Rolf Potts
Whoever created the world went to a lot of trouble. It would be downright rude not to go out and see as much of it as possible.
Edward Readicker-Henderson
The real home of man is not his house but the road. Life itself is a travel that has to be done by foot.
Bruce Chatwin
You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
Paul Theroux
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back
Paul Theroux
Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.
Paul Theroux
...luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose...
Paul Theroux
There's always a way if you're not in a hurry.
Paul Theroux
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars... Anything is possible on a train...
Paul Theroux
Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.
Paul Theroux
Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.
Paul Theroux
Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.
Paul Theroux
As a traveler, I've often found that the more a culture differs from my own, the more I am struck by its essential humanity.
Rick Steves