Quotes by Travel Writers - Page 2

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.
Paul Theroux
What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wrong. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself: I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates.
Freya Stark
We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays "Happy Birthday" is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind.
Eric Hansen
But what I do know is this: you got to find your own places. The places you get, girl, the ones that stick in your heart. And if you’re lucky, you find people to share them with.
Kirsten Hubbard
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
Paul Theroux
There comes a moment in all travel when you know that you have really started. It may be weeks before you start or weeks after you have started; it is a spiritual emotion, a turning towards the future with an eager heart...
H.V. Morton
For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead - out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need - we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called "lifestyle," travel becomes just another accessory - a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.
Rolf Potts
If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear and sometimes - importantly - to suffer the effects of this curiosity.
Paul Theroux
In the travellers’ world, social media have enlarged the generation gap. The internet has brought a change in the very concept of travel as a process taking one away from the familiar into the unknown. Now the familiar is not left behind and the unknown has become familiar even before one leaves home. Unpredictability – to my generation the salt that gave travelling its savour – seems unnecessary if not downright irritating to many of the young. The sunset challenge – where to sleep? – has been banished by the ease of booking into a hostel or organised campsite with a street plan provided by the internet. Moreover, relatives and friends evidently expect regular reassurance about the traveller’s precise location and welfare – and vice versa, the traveller needing to know that all is well back home. Notoriously, dependence on instant communication with distant family and friends is known to stunt the development of self-reliance. Perhaps that is why, amongst younger travellers, one notices a new timidity.
Dervla Murphy
I stood there, battered by the raw power and sheer magnificence of a land I'd never known
Don George
I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveler: £10,000 for the first man to over Marco Polo’s outward route, reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he a drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.
Robert Byron
In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.
Paul Theroux
If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.
Paul Theroux
Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder.
Bruce Chatwin
At a time when so many people are just checking things off a bucket list, other travelers are finding that they want more. Going Local explores the whys and how to’s of really experiencing an area and its culture through the people who live there. Includes a plethora of real life travel stories from experts and everyday people alike.
Nicholas Kontis
As we sat in the sun, drinking tea made from maple leaves (seasoned with apple and apricot), as we meandered through the 19th Century European park that leads toward the tiny lane on which our favourite tatami tea house is hidden – Don had come here ten months earlier after his Japanese father in law died - I thought how distinctive Don’s relaxed and responsive spirit can be. I’d walked these same streets with other friends for twenty seven years now, many of them celebrated travelers; they’d fired questions at me, shot out theories, spun this notion about Japan and that judgment.Don, by comparison, hung back. He seemed eager to take in as much as he possibly could. He didn’t have agenda or preoccupation, and in that regard appeared to rejoice in the rare traveler’s gift of allowing the day and the place to take him where they wanted him to go.
Don George
Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort....My only boast in travel is my effort...
Paul Theroux
As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water.
Eric Newby
Life is short and the older you get, the more you feel it. Indeed, you begin to realize how short life is. Almost everyone has at least one friend who left the planet too soon. People lose their capacity to walk, run, think, and experience life. I realize how important it is to use the time I have to see as much of the world as I can.
Nicholas Kontis
Sometimes, you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable.
Colin Thubron
I had a heady dream of loving her, as if she were an actress on a stage of my own making; and as the night wore on, my imaginings wandered into make-believe, and died beyond the tent of the mosquito net, where Vincent was snoring, and the African stars were shining in through our lone window, and nothing was quite real.
Colin Thubron
I live to leave.
Judith Fein
The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
Paul Theroux
The Pacific, greatest of oceans, has an area exceeding that of all dry land on the planet. Herman Melville called it "the tide-beating heart of earth." Covering more than a third of the planet's surface--as much as the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans combined--it's the largest geographical feature in the world. Its awesome 165,384,000 square km (up to 16,000 km wide and 11,000 km long) have an average depth of around 4,000 meters. Half the world's liquid water is stored here. You could drop the entire dry landmass of our planet into the Pacific and still have room for another continent the size of Asia. One theory claims the moon may have been flung from the Pacific while the world was still young.
David Stanley
What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.
Paul Theroux
A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea...Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don't go right now, we're never going to do it. And we'll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.
Tim Cahill
It is my hope that this book will help to demystify the origins of travel writing and show that when thousands of travelers follow a guidebook word-for-word, recommendation-for-recommendation, it not only harms contemporary international travel but can also do serious harm to places in developing countries.
Thomas Kohnstamm
The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you
Freya Stark
Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Paul Theroux
When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy!
Barbara Conelli
Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.
Bruce Chatwin
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
Freya Stark
..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, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of travelling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living – indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.
Paul Theroux
I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.
Rick Steves
You can't control the past, but you can control where you go next.
Kirsten Hubbard
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Paul Theroux
The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.
Rolf Potts
Self-consciousness kills communication.
Rick Steves
One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy— at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.
Paul Theroux
So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
Paul Theroux
Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.
Paul Theroux
Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.
Freya Stark
The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.
Paul Theroux
What's the good of being alive if you don't do anything?
Kirsten Hubbard
I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity.
Paul Theroux
Elk were mating now - The males were fighting, and they had to chase the females, which depleted the fat that both sexes had accumulated over the summer and thereby diminished their chances of surviving the winter. "It would be better for the elk," Dave said as we prepared dinner, "if the females just gave it up."All three women stared at him. A silence ensued. Dave said, "Or I could be wrong.
Tim Cahill
The world is'nt such a bad place at all - as long as one did'nt read the daily newspaper
Bill Aitken
I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without having been wounded. Love was power and possession, love caused pain: you were never more exposed than when you were in love, never more wounded; possession was an enslavement, something stifling.
Paul Theroux
Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. You're protected on your hands and knees. It's either that or wings.
Paul Theroux
Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
Freya Stark
I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.
Bruce Chatwin
Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from
Rolf Potts
The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
Paul Theroux
...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
Paul Theroux
The secret to youth is to fill your mind with beauty! Amen
Linda Ballou
In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
Paul Theroux
And new physical problems are arising almost daily. I'm getting problems from a painful trapped nerve in my shoulder, where my rucksack strap has been pinching it, and I can't straighten my arm above shoulder level - soon I will be limping like Richard III. By now my back is covered with eczema, the result of a perpetually sodden shirt and rucksack pressed against it day after day in this heat. In one place my pack has rubbed a painful hole in my skin through the eczema; carrying my rucksack was unpleasant before, but now it is purgatory. This eczema must be partly due to eating bad food for so long - I never had this problem at home. I'm expecting my teeth and hair to start falling out before long, and I've got more or less a permanent acid indigestion from eating so much junk. Week after week I've lived on lukewarm Coca-Cola, stale buns and doughnuts, slurps, green bananas, powdered milk and far too many cigarettes. With all the rubbishy food and sugar soft drinks I've been consuming, I'll see the east coast through a hypoglycaemic haze.
Fran Sandham
You ever want to negotiate a hostage situation in Quebec, I'm your man. Send me in for a little parley and the francophone miscreants will flee, hands over bleeding ears.
Will Ferguson
‎Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.
Jonathan Raban
Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
Paul Theroux