Quotes by Writers - Page 106

Osaka: Ah Get to ponderin' when Christmas rolls around. Y'all know Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer? That's messed up, y'know? Saying his nose will help light the way at night ain't no way t'make him feel better about it. If you told a bald fella you needed the light reflecting off his head to see, he'd like to punch you. Santa's a cruel bully.
Kiyohiko Azuma
How come if people keep telling me I'm so smart, I keep doing such stupid things?
George Watsky
Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.
H.G.Wells
Men employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.
Voltaire
From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I
Fernando Pessoa
Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.
Voltaire
There is a saying, if any stranger enquire of the first met of Maan, were it even a child, “Who is here the sheykh?” he would answer him “I am he.
Charles M. Doughty
Travel opens your mind as few other things do. It is its own form of hypnotism, and I am forever under its spell.
Libba Bray
This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.
Hilary Mantel
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
Hilary Mantel
When you traveled with company, the country would shrink away; your companion would become the subject of your voyage as much as the country itself. As for group travel, the country would end up being the silent host whose presence one forgets like one does an overly timid guest, the principal subject becoming the backdrop.
Édouard Levé
In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society’s rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community’s identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability.
Édouard Levé
The road was wet with rain, black and shiny like oilskin. The reflection of the street lamps wallowed like yellow jelly-fish. A bus was approaching - a bus to Piccadilly, a bus to the never-never land - a bus to death or glory.I found neither. I found something which haunts me still.The great bus swayed as it sped. The black street gleamed. Through the window a hundred faces fluttered by as though the leaves of a dark book were being flicked over. And I sat there, with a sixpenny ticket in my hand. What was I doing! Where was I going?("Same Time, Same Place")
Mervyn Peake
But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.
Isabelle Eberhardt
There were lots of things to stop and see - and then it was time to go, always time to go.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Separating fact and fiction in Inca history is impossible, because virtually all the sources available are Spanish accounts of stories that had already been vetted by the Inca emperors to highlight their own heroic roles. Imagine a history of modern Iraq written by Dick Cheney and based on authorized biographies of Sadam Hussein published in Arabic, and you'll get some idea of what historians face.
Mark Adams
London was one of the worst places to have a bad day and one of the best places to have a good day
Mhairi McFarlane
Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny.
Hilaire Belloc
To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.
Alan W. Watts
When you're traveling you need to take care of yourself to get by, you have to keep an eye on yourself and your place in the world. It means concentrating on yourself, thinking about yourself and looking after yourself. So when you travel all you really encounter is yourself, as if that were the whole point of it. When you're at home you simply are, you don't have to struggle with anything or achieve anything. You don't have to worry about the railways connections, and timetables, you don't need to experience any thrills or disappointments. You can put yourself to one side - and that's when you see the most.
Olga Tokarczuk
For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and, although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice... No, it is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worth while the journey.
Wilfred Thesiger
After all, one travels in order for things to happen and change; otherwise you might as well stay at home.
Nicolas Bouvier
I sat down and knitted for some time - my usual resource under discouraging circumstances.
Isabella L. Bird
Everything suggests a beyond.
Isabella L. Bird
In traveling, there is nothing like dissecting people's statements, which are usually colored by their estimate of the powers or likings of the person spoken to, making all reasonable inquiries, and then pertinaciously but quietly carrying out one's own plans.
Isabella L. Bird
I am free to go wherever I want for the rest of my life.
Faith Ringgold
A boat would seem to be an object whose one purpose is to travel, but its real purpose is not to travel but to reach harbour. We found ourselves on the high seas, with no idea of which port we should be aiming for.
Fernando Pessoa
Traveling can get kind of lonely sometimes, er… no, not traveling. What is the word? Life. Life can get kind of lonely.
John Mulaney
Here we are at last. The Italian proverb says “See Naples and die” but I say, see Naples and live; for there seems a great deal worth living for.
Arthur John Strutt
So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.
Aldous Huxley
Travel is like adultery; one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live...in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.
Anatole Broyard
We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it; and seeing one is quite enough.
Samuel Johnson
…So, um, you’re from Rochester? Like, New York?” Jersey asked.“Yup, we used to live out there,” Rudger confirmed, nonchalant. “You ever been?”“Naw, the closest I’ve ever been to there would be… well, believe it or not, New Jersey, the place where my parents named me after. It was crowded, polluted and full of crime… I loved it.
Rebecca McNutt
No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.
Wilfred Thesiger
We're all astronauts, really, aren't we; interstellar astronauts, travelling so far into the blackness we can never return.
S.K. Tremayne
In the Balkans the peasants say that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you are born under A LILAC-BLEEDING STAR.
Lesley Blanch
His diaries had begun to assume something of the knowingness of incipient middle age; at times, indeed, he was in danger of becoming priggish and opinionated. As with many later European voyagers, travel in this part of the world, far from broadening the mind, seemed instead to lead to a blanket distrust of anyone of a different creed, colour or class.
William Dalrymple
Let’s get one thing straight at the beginning. A lunar eclipse simply will not do. You may have seen a partial solar eclipse, but neither will that do. The sun is such a monster that until a few minutes before totality the light from the sun blasts right around the disk of the moon and the Earth is little changed. Annie Dillard wrote that the difference between a partial eclipse and a total one is the difference between kissing a man and marrying him. Just so. So people search out totality, no matter how remote the spot. And so we have come to Svalbard.- from Out in the Cold
Bill Murray
Everything is just how I imagined it, yet everything is new
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A good traveler is one who who does not know where he is going to , and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.
Lin Yutang
Clever and civilized men will not stay homeLeave your homeland and explore foreign fieldsGo out! You shall find replacement for those you have leftGive your all, the sweetness of life will be tasted after the struggleI have seen that standing water stagnatesIf it flows, it is pure, if it does not, it will become murkyIf the lion doesn’t leave his den, he will not eatIf the arrow does not leave the bow, it will not strikeIf the sun stands still in its orbitMan will tire of itGold dust merely soil before excavatedAloewood is just ordinary wood if in the forestTravel by Imam Syafii
Ahmad Fuadi
[E]very journey is played out between standstill and flight.
Claudio Magris
To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street.
Claudio Magris
There are many hostelries in his report, which is the true account of an expedition.
Claudio Magris
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
After Supper the Master dismissed all except Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie and Sha the Monk. He took them out with him and said, "Look at that wonderful moolight. It makes me long for the time when I can return home.
Wu Cheng'en
That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.
Nicolas Bouvier
Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.
William Dalrymple
These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind
Hilaire Belloc
I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh.
Isabella L. Bird
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.
Samuel Johnson
You can handle just about anything that comes at you out on the road with a believable grin, common sense and whiskey.
Bill Murray
Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
John Ruskin
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
Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you.
Nicolas Bouvier
No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.
John Ruskin
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Lin Yutang
The Wanderlust has got me... by the belly-aching fire
Robert W. Service
Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.
Isabelle Eberhardt