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Link Quote Stars Tags Author
3c97597 Not all those who wander are lost. travel wander quest lost journey J.R.R. Tolkien
547b678 Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. travel change growth discworld Terry Pratchett
e68a351 It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. travel journey Ursula K. Le Guin
6ddf536 What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. travel goodbye Jack Kerouac
647c9de We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. travel inspirational seekers quest journey anaïs nin
fb44556 Travel far enough, you meet yourself. travel inspirational David Mitchell
beaa5d0 All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost. tolkien travel wander shine wanderlust journey J.R.R. Tolkien
28e3a5d It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport. travel humor Douglas Adams
d58d4f8 "Augustus," I said. "Really. You don't have to do this." "Sure I do," he said. "I found my Wish." "God, you're the best," I told him. "I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel," he answered." travel wish John Green
dbe8a1c Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life travel Jack Kerouac
bba24e7 ...there ain't no journey what don't change you some. travel inspirational journey David Mitchell
a824746 There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. travel openmindedness Robert Louis Stevenson
e02500b We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered. travel Kahlil Gibran
e5a896e See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security. travel Ray Bradbury
5fa6512 We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. travel self-awareness love inspirational Pico Iyer
1e90629 "People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they travel immortality life Marcel Proust
cdda6dd Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else. travel courage inspirational just-do-it inaction Tennesse Williams
e5f5f8b Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once. travel food Anthony Bourdain
4bbca29 No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet. travel inspirational Patrick Rothfuss
7fe339d It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling. travel Gustave Flaubert
b68fad9 I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move. travel perceptive John Steinbeck
2eaab2a I tramp a perpetual journey. travel perpetual tramp Walt Whitman
9fd15b9 There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world. travel life inspirational Audrey Niffenegger
d8bae8f "So I find words I never thought to speak words travel poetry fantasy little-gidding visit shore streets mystery timelessness T.S. Eliot
a43d521 There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it. travel Colum McCann
7aea9d6 So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry travel life love awakening Jack Kerouac
d953904 Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was. travel starting-point place leave miss Jodi Picoult
26b2e38 Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love. travel Clive Barker
86f6b90 The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.. travel risk inspirational Paul Theroux
1197cb7 Everything will be alright in the end so if it is not alright it is not the end. deborah-moggach india travel life inspirational Deborah Moggach
8f971ab "Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret. Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It's quite wonderful, really. You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, "far removed from the seats of strife," as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It's where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter. At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don't think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don't think, "Hey, I did sixteen miles today," any more than you think, "Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today." It's just what you do." travel zentime woods walking Bill Bryson
8481fd9 Paradise was always over there, a day's sail away. But it's a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home. travel happiness escapism paradise wanderlust J. Maarten Troost
73e6f76 I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe. travel humorous Jon Ronson
94ab205 "I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more." ( June 19, 1787)" travel Thomas Jefferson
6227dba The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca. travel Anthony Bourdain
41a93ce "My grandfather says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. "To travel without moving an inch." travel opportunity books jhumpa-lahiri the-namesake Jhumpa Lahiri
5c74210 That's the place to get to--nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world's somewheres, into our own nowhere. travel wandering wanderlust D.H. Lawrence
2c72413 They say no land remains to be discovered, no continent is left unexplored. But the whole world is out there, waiting, just waiting for me. I want to do things-- I want to walk the rain-soaked streets of London, and drink mint tea in Casablanca. I want to wander the wastelands of the Gobi desert and see a yak. I think my life's ambition is to see a yak. I want to bargain for trinkets in an Arab market in some distant, dusty land. There's so much. But, most of all, I want to do things that will mean something. travel dreams Lisa Ann Sandell
0032fa9 A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me. travel Alain de Botton
7d438b6 All good people agree, And all good people say, All nice people, like Us, are We And every one else is They: But if you cross over the sea, Instead of over the way, You may end by (think of it!) looking on We As only a sort of They! travel we they segregation xenophobia Rudyard Kipling
b29eb62 "Fare well we call to hearth and hall Though wind may blow and rain may fall We must away ere break of day Over the wood and mountain tall To Rivendell where Elves yet dwell In glades beneath the misty fell Through moor and waste we ride in haste And wither then we cannot tell With foes ahead behind us dread Beneath the sky shall be our bed Until at last our toil be sped Our journey done, our errand sped travel J.R.R. Tolkien
97fae73 Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it. travel Hermann Hesse
6b30158 Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. travel sexing-the-cherry journey Jeanette Winterson
2acf165 Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. travel Maya Angelou
56c6622 They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey. travel Cormac McCarthy
f80c057 People move around so much in the world, things get lost. travel world people lost Emma Donoghue
1e5b2de ...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. travel wanderlust Jack Kerouac
1dade0c It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. travel san-francisco Jack Kerouac
4d646f1 He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. travel Julian Barnes
bd77957 You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home. travel journeys Terry Pratchett
e0ff43f I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits. travel Evelyn Waugh
523ab58 Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. travel Eudora Welty
f5f84b5 I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations. travel Bill Bryson
b6caea0 No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It's like your shadow. It follows you everywhere. -Komura travel runaway shadow yourself Haruki Murakami
04622de It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you -- are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much...the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling...you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you'll be there. travel new-journalism landscape place Lawrence Durrell
10c4464 "I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, "Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight." My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: "When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town - to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go." travel writing trust remedy self-recovery pen healing self-esteem writers bell hooks
5a91447 The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory. travel inspirational wicked Gregory Maguire
4af1955 The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile. travel metaphorical research journey Ursula K. Le Guin
098e7d4 I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.) loneliness travel wind Bret Easton Ellis
46197b3 Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! . . . It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water. travel inspiration sailing searching-and-finding moving moving-forward growth sea Malcolm Lowry
f8e903b What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country ... we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits ... this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing ... Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal's use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves. travel fear Albert Camus
e3e462f "Oh! That was poetry!" said Pippin. "Do you really mean to start before the break of day?" travel humour poetry funny pippin lotr J.R.R. Tolkien
fecfd41 One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind. travel forgiveness Charles Dickens
2be9c5c [Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside. travel walking Elizabeth von Arnim
c87c0ad Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-seeker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy stores or Bradshaw's than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works. At one time I never went out without a second-hand bookseller's list in my pocket. I know no reading more fruity. Of course to read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him? and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint-pot. And like the dope-fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter. Books are so necessary to me that when in a railway train I have become aware that fellow-travellers have come away without a single one I have been seized with a veritable dismay. But when I am starting on a long journey the problem is formidable. travel bibliomania W. Somerset Maugham
163bc3f 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. travel trust life strangers Paul Theroux
4013b18 It seemed like all the way to tomorrow and over it to the days beyond. time travel journey J.R.R. Tolkien
f04af26 The measure of civilized behavior is compassion. travel humanity Paul Theroux
fcd66a1 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. travel train Mark Helprin
a5ab5e5 Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here, nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life. travel Colleen McCullough
56adb7d 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. travel tourist Tahir Shah
f92195c I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity? travel Charlotte Brontë
0522c42 Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship. travel return pleasure Tahir Shah
99d0dd3 I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads. travel soul Paulo Coelho
7c4eef2 What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering. travel reality Hermann Hesse
fd9707d I have no nostalgia for the patriarchy, please believe me. But what I have come to realize is that, when that patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is--I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age. travel self-esteem Elizabeth Gilbert
8657a1a Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me. travel Ralph Ellison
f38c8f6 You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back travel gone home Paul Theroux
05fcef2 "It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Book-Bag." travel bibliomania Robin McKinley
e71c191 Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one's prejudices. travel Oscar Wilde
ed322fb Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts. travel thoughts Alain de Botton
e39cb4b Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans travel John Steinbeck
957d726 Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can. travel Bill Bryson
ecc23d1 David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali. travel tourists tourism Douglas Adams
c8a7723 "How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal." literature travel E.M. Forster
74a77a8 I read. That's my form of travel. travel Michael Finkel
7dfe776 I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. travel depression stagnent the-bell-jar stale sour guilt mental-health Sylvia Plath
b58c9da Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake...when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains. travel walking Rebecca Solnit
b166bb5 And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes; and this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music. [...]As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up - probably somebody lighting a wood-fire-and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, Under-Hill, again. He got up trembling. travel magic songs J.R.R. Tolkien
6c89548 Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn't a country; it's a near-death experience. travel death 1990s city-centre european night-club post-communist sofia bulgaria country nightlife adventure eastern-europe crisis europeans europe Bill Bryson
637aefc I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk. travel gave-up resign forgiveness drunk beat-generation Jack Kerouac
a189a92 who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded and loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, travel death sadness beauty-alone impatience insight Allen Ginsberg
8c52df1 The best way to know a city is to eat it. travel friends home food Scott Westerfeld
4d77fd2 I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off poverty travel haggling Alex Garland
5b362b3 Travel opens your mind as few other things do. It is its own form of hypnotism, and I am forever under its spell. travel Libba Bray
8096761 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. travel serendipity travel-writing stories Paul Theroux
75e8bcc Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration. travel Mary Roach
1955887 If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'. A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present. story travel writing Alain de Botton
6ccc9cd To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. travel reading Ernest Hemingway
1b5c1b8 "He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us!" travel judgement David Sedaris
f9cd816 For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes. travel moving Joanne Harris
a16ec38 At times, it almost felt like I was destined to take the trip, like all the people I met had somehow been waiting for me travel people-relations Nicholas Sparks
b0c8053 They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.] travel Virginia Woolf
33b3c1e Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. travel living-abroad George Eliot
60ef454 "Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him: "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business anymore. And secondly, to answer you question...yes." travel humor food pleasure Elizabeth Gilbert
7339014 Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul. travel supertramp travel-writer into-the-wild Jon Krakauer
d3290ca Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist. travel travel-writing Evelyn Waugh
a62c00c In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. travel ship water Joseph Conrad
7696824 Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul. travel future unrest machine civilisation civilization science-fiction soul E.M. Forster
09b55f9 Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget. enlightenment travel learning landscape meditation Barry Lopez
3e4aa25 for every mile the feet go the heart goes nine travel poetry E.E. Cummings
2ba7c81 "Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. "But to lose oneself in a city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for quite a different schooling." To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography." travel self-awareness Rebecca Solnit
43ed922 "In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to "Yes, he's arrived safely,"and "Last time we heard he was in Oregon," and "We expect him back in a few weeks." I'm not saying this was necessarily better, let alone more character-forming; just that in my case it probably helped not to have my parents a button's touch away, spilling out anxieties and long-range weather forecasts, warning me against floods, epidemics and psychos who preyed on backpackers." travel postcards technology Julian Barnes
ea3e16c There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures. Each part assumes its proper dimensions: continents are not looked at in the light of islands, or islands considered as mere specks, which are, in truth, larger than many kingdoms of Europe. Africa, or North and South America, are well-sounding names, and easily pronounced; but it is not until having sailed for weeks along small portions of their shores, that one is thoroughly convinced what vast spaces on our immense world these names imply. travel worldview Charles Darwin
ae03252 "Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised--the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs--but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way." travel humanity politics identity-politics regressives wise Christopher Hitchens
327da33 There's always a way if you're not in a hurry. travel Paul Theroux
b7ba0d3 Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart. travel traveler Tahir Shah
539c004 [A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret. travel freedom life wandering repression Michael Chabon
2a6ab10 It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends. travel Susanna Clarke
fc89794 If travel were so inspiring and informing a business...then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries. travel Sinclair Lewis
1053f08 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. travel traveller Paul Theroux
c1fd9d9 As for me... I'm fine. I have bad dreams, but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scares. I like the way that sounds. I carry a lot of scares. travel life Alex Garland
7c5448f Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts. travel learning change Jack Kerouac
a863d08 "For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. "Longing," says the poet Robert Hass, "because desire is full of endless distances." Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world." color travel distance long desire wanderlust Rebecca Solnit
d532845 By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it. travel Bill Bryson
f401973 If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. travel world unfair sublime Alain de Botton
8e8c7e3 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. travel people humanity Rick Steves
0996b42 "Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?" travel possessions technology Nathaniel Hawthorne
6f6304a I believe the experiences reported in this book are reproducible by anyone who wishes to try. I went to Africa. You can go to Africa. You may have trouble arranging the time or the money, but everybody has trouble arranging something. I believe you can travel anywhere if you want to badly enough. And I believe the same is true of inner travel. You don't have to take my word about chakras or healing energy or auras. You can find about them for yourself if you want to. Don't take my word for it. Be as skeptical as you like. Find out for yourself. travel spirituality spiritual psychic skepticism Michael Crichton
3f231b6 A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation travel observation journey Tahir Shah
a57a40c Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls. travel tourists Don DeLillo
ab8b19e A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life. travel page-151 Amy Hempel
8ba5bed Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat. india travel Tahir Shah
891e95d "Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight....what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughters, who wanted to be a writer. [I said], "Tell your daughter three things." Tell her to read...Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. ...Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means. Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these are three I trust. -- from "A Voice" travel reading writing writers-on-writing writers Barry Lopez
5f77319 Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner. travel reading writing friends Christopher Hitchens
cc9b4c3 The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible. travel scientists explorer Alain de Botton
d7ad7c8 Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men. travel don-quixote flying Graham Greene
dcf3ae7 Homesickness is absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find. travel John Cheever
311d2fc At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families. travel cafeteria diner motorways anonymity disappointment Alain de Botton
5a846a8 Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:--the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:--the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:--the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?--she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didn't let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didn't mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I've come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God--but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didn't know she loved me--I didn't understand. sex travel Jack Kerouac
2c93b2c Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. travel Robert Louis Stevenson
7ebe116 A little imagination goes a long way in Fes. travel morocco Tahir Shah
28e48ab Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers. travel mystery Truman Capote
b6910eb It was an awkward moment. We were burning down our host's house, a situation which any guest seeks to avoid. travel host guest fire Tahir Shah
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