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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
9e1deb6 Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends. travel wilderness Tahir Shah
b91fb4f In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm. danger harm protection travel Tahir Shah
6991ea4 Inscribed on it was a verse from the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, the eleventh-century Persian mystic. Reading the words aloud I prepared for a most amazing journey: The sages who have compassed sea and land, Their secret to search out and understand, My mind misgives me if they ever solve The scheme on which the universe is planned. sufis sword travel Tahir Shah
92616be We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places! travel Milan Kundera
1a450b1 I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they there. Everybody else is just a tourist. Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter. Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you? travel venice Tad Williams
deec16a Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean--an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance jack-london the-road tramp travel Jack London
be67ef2 This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don't know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I'm sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I've lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I've done here and I'm afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories... cape-breton home leaving loss memory moving nostalgia nova-scotia remember scared scary travel Rebecca McNutt
671f4e2 ...a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. travel Michael Lewis
85de538 We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up into a top travel experience. travel travel-writing Pete McCarthy
a7ca6a0 Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi. enlightenment india travel varanasi Tahir Shah
d89c45c As a romantic ideal, turbulent, impoverished India could still weave its spell, and the key to it all - the colours, the moods, the scents, the subtle, mysterious light, the poetry, the heightened expectations, the kind of beauty that made your heart miss a beat - well, that remained the monsoon. monsoon travel Alexander Frater
2ce48a3 ...the Sierra, a region so quiet and pristine that we have the sense of being the first human beings ever to set foot in it. We fall silent ourselves in its midst, as if conversation in a place of such primaevl solitude would be like talking in church. sierra-madre-mountains travel west Jim Fergus
0299cc0 I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way. learning travel Martha Gellhorn
8c017b2 The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be. humor humour travel Bill Bryson
c6bef55 "[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts." historic-preservation travel Bill Bryson
a68eb2d Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time. explore silence solitude time travel wanderlust Rebecca Solnit
292f973 Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive. hiking misogyny nature travel walking wanderlust Rebecca Solnit
4aa9e85 Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character. travel Truman Capote
87d2be4 Sail far. Sail fast. fire-and-blood journey quest sail sea travel George R.R. Martin
7575003 "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." perceptions travel Paul Theroux
d48643a Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality. misogyny nature rape-culture travel walking wanderlust Rebecca Solnit
65e5fd2 No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more. travel Rebecca Solnit
b8abc87 We are, after all, citizens of the world - a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. 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 McDonald's? 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. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, Senor Tamale Stand Owner, Sushi-chef-san, Monsieur Bucket-head. What's that feathered game bird, hanging on the porch, getting riper by the day, the body nearly ready to drop off? I want some. eating food food-writing travel Anthony Bourdain
68f6e0d Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience. travel writing Paul Theroux
eba3d83 I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable. primitive travel Graham Greene
da82568 There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. memoir travel writing Anne Morrow Lindbergh
cd1c1ec What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so difficult for us to allow ourselves a little time to solve the puzzle of our own lives, before it's too late? selfishness travel Elizabeth Gilbert
0a7f20a We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green. globetrotting green jungle landscapes southeast-asia travel travel-writing verdant Geoff Dyer
01f3077 One who was born by the ocean or has associated with it cannot ever be quite content away from it for very long cortez log love ocean steinbeck travel John Steinbeck
e72af3d I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand. marrakech travel Tahir Shah
4168513 Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else. india travel Tahir Shah
624ef2c There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage. journey mules travel Tahir Shah
eb5b7a6 I'd love to be a tabletop in Paris, where food is art and life combined in one, where people gather and talk for hours. I want lovers to meet over me. I'd want to be covered in drops of candle wax and breadcrumbs and rings from the bottom of wineglasses. I would never be lonely, and I would always serve a good purpose. france paris parisians travel travel-quotes travel-writing young-adult young-adult-fiction young-adult-romance young-adult-series Maureen Johnson
651dd23 Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be. travel Alain de Botton
90337c2 The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it. travel wonderlust Bill Bryson
8e296e6 "When you are walking down the road in Bali and your pass a stranger, the very first question he or she will ask you is, "Where are you going?" The second question is, "Where are you coming from?" To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they're just trying to get an orientation on you, trying to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that you don't know where you're going, or that you're just wandering about randomly, you might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It's far better to pick some kind of specific direction -- anywhere -- just so everybody feels better. The third question a Balinese will almost certainly ask you is, "Are you married?" Again, it's a positioning and orienting inquiry. It's necessary for them to know this, to make sure that you are completely in order in your life. They really want you to say yes. it's such a relief to them when you say yes. If you're single, it's better not to say so directly. And I really recommend that you not mention your divorce at all, if you happen to have had one. It just makes the Balinese so worried. The only thing your solitude proves to them is your perilous dislocation from the grid. If you are a single woman traveling through Bali and somebody asks you, "Are you married?" the best possible answer is: "Not yet." This is a polite way of saying, "No," while indicating your optimistic intentions to get that taken care of just as soon as you can. Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still: "Not yet." purpose travel Elizabeth Gilbert
f47d42b As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end. travel writing Tahir Shah
8205f6d As anyone who's ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed. bus-travel ethiopia travel Tahir Shah
d04ed42 For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure. history journey travel Tahir Shah
fdc6c3e In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough. india logic rules travel Tahir Shah
ced89d5 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. exploration memories nature novelty travel walking wandering Rebecca Solnit
265935a - Dobbiamo andare e non fermarci finche non siamo arrivati. - Dove andiamo? - Non lo so, ma dobbiamo andare. travel travelling Jack Kerouac
dc69ed1 Traveling can never be taken for granted, no matter how meticulous the preparations. preparation travel travel-writing Eugene Linden
baf6c9a Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children. social-anxiety trains travel travelling Iris Murdoch
4f5cca4 There are more places you haven't heard of then you're heard of!' I loved that travel world Jonathan Safran Foer
0190a2b The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me--all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them--but it had not in me. feminism nature rape-culture solitude travel wanderlust Rebecca Solnit
4797f61 The South Pacific is memorable because when you are in the islands you simply cannot ignore nature. You cannot avoid looking up at the stars, large as apples on a new tree. You cannot deafen your ear to the thunder of the surf. The bright sands, the screaming birds, and the wild winds are always with you. travel James A. Michener
e1457b9 ... to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. sacrifice travel Elizabeth Gilbert
baed04d 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. sight-seeing train-travel travel Paul Theroux
6e9a405 A good story makes a journey go by more quickly. A really good story makes you forget you are even on a journey. travel Lynne Rae Perkins
a43f9be I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don't you think? travel Patricia Highsmith
9b46437 Bilbo was sadly reflecting that adventures are not all pony-rides in May-sunshine... hardship may-sunshine ponies travel J.R.R. Tolkien
4436490 The farther I travel, the less I wonder at anything: a few days reconcile one to a new spot, or an unseen custom; and men are so much the same everywhere, that one scare perceives a change in situation. jaded travel Horace Walpole
669d460 "As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination." entropy journeys ralph-waldo-emerson travel Colson Whitehead
3c4e9d0 What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant... death travel Victor Hugo
ea4bb54 It was a strange trek -- the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused. imagination travel David Brin
31adbc9 "Pico Iyer: "And at some point, I thought, well, I've been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I've spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around--you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there's this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps." beauty enlightenment faith humanity inner-landscape introspection mindfulness mystery nature peace spirit travel wisdom Krista Tippett
c6770c0 The South Pacific is not a paradise, in the sense that Eden wasn't either. There are always apples and snakes. But it is a wonderful place to live. The green vales of Tahiti, the hills of Guadalcanal, the towering peaks about Wau, and the noonday brilliance of Rabaul have enchanted many white travelers who have stayed on for many years and built happy lives. Often on a cool night when the beer was plentiful and the stories alluring, we have envied the men and women of the South Pacific travel James A. Michener
8cf3268 In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most basic rules of arithmetic no longer held true. drugs humor humour lmao travel Geoff Dyer
b6ec2a5 She got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky. death plane sadness travel vivid-descriptions Jonathan Tropper
fb6c0a3 "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." preconceptions travel Eric Hansen
8e189a5 "I don't want anything else bad to happen," she whispered, her voice choked with tears. "I'm so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I'm guilty of so many things. I'm sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I'm sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world." "I wasn't alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn't really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere," Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing." apart bad crying damaged death eighties friend friendship greenhouse grief guilt hopelessness lonliness love murder omen shadow smile sorrow tears together travel trouble world Rebecca McNutt
ac1a4db I've heard that when you're in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you're hyper-aware of what's happening around you. As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me. Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren't bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder's cursing, my pounding heartbeat. I feel nothing--not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb. Scent and taste disappear. The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land--a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet--and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I've never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent--it dips and curves in ways I don't recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect. And it's not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind. amy-martin beth-revis crash discovery earth elder godspeed home journey life mission planet shades-of-earth shuttle travel Beth Revis
221bf69 Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story. Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there... roads trails travel Rebecca Solnit
cecdc1b The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it. delhi farakka-express ghosts india travel Tahir Shah
6f062af A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came. memory nostalgia old-age travel youth Rebecca Solnit
75a3e7b Like Salvador Dali's paintings of watches melting in the sand, time wanders at its own curious pace whenever you're on vacation in a foreign country. inspirational-quotes laurie-nadel laurie-nadel-quotes quote-about-life quote-of-the-day quote-of-the-week quotes-twitter salvador-dali travel vacation vacation-quotes wayne-dyer Laurie Nadel
313d5bf "With the first jolt he was in daylight; they had left the gateways of King's Cross, and were under blue sky. Tunnels followed, and after each the sky grew bluer, and from the embankment at Finsbury Park he had his first sight of the sun. It rolled along behind the eastern smokes -- a wheel, whose fellow was the descending moon -- and as yet it seemed the servant of the blue sky, not its lord. He dozed again. Over Tewin Water it was day. To the left fell the shadow of the embankment and its arches; to the right Leonard saw up into the Tewin Woods and towards the church, with its wild legend of immortality. Six forest trees -- that is a fact -- grow out of one of the graves in Tewin churchyard. The grave's occupant -- that is the legend -- is an atheist, who declared that if God existed, six forest trees would grow out of her grave. These things in Hertfordshire; and farther afield lay the house of a hermit -- Mrs. Wilcox had known him -- who barred himself up, and wrote prophecies, and gave all he had to the poor. While, powdered in between, were the villas of business men, who saw life more steadily, though with the steadiness of the half-closed eye. Over all the sun was streaming, to all the birds were singing, to all the primroses were yellow, and the speedwell blue, and the country, however they interpreted her, was uttering her cry of "now. " She did not free Leonard yet, and the knife plunged deeper into his heart as the train drew up at Hilton. But remorse had become beautiful." blue flowers remorse travel E.M. Forster
bb93cb2 Great artists make the entire world their home. travel world Chaim Potok
1d1b76d The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered: 'The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people live dispersed in poverty: the teak trees and the jungles have been cleared... but the importance of the Gonds must not be forgotten! america geography gondwana india myth travel Tahir Shah
5f7957b He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there. travel Jack Kerouac
6505b14 It doesn't matter where I go, I don't want to be there. And then I get to the next place, and I don't want to be there either. love sad travel Laurie Halse Anderson
45aa5dc "And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk, When you get the chance, she said to me, "go." travel Frances Mayes
f3691ad I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it. india travel writing Tahir Shah
21b5707 The feeling of a place was the best reason to go. culture tourism travel Robert Kurson
45f7195 "..."The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don't suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse's. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn't we?" He appealed to Lucy. "There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine's great stories. 'My dear sister loves flowers,' it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue -- vases and jugs -- and the story ends with 'So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.' It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets."..." florence flowers italy travel violets E.M. Forster
4ef55fa Foras Road has a sordid reputation (...) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution. india prostitutes travel travel-writing women Tahir Shah
b658479 "<>. Jose Saramago, "Viaggio in Portogallo" saramago travel José Saramago
fed2da0 If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. self-knowledge sense-of-self travel James Baldwin
4c22745 Many are the friendships that have found an unforseeen and sudden end on a journey, and few are those that survive it. travel Elizabeth von Arnim
8e8017a If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind, the city will reveal itself to you. Maybe it won't become yours, but you will become its - its chronicler, its pilgrim, its ardent lover, its nonnative son or native daughter or defender. community maps travel walking Rebecca Solnit
35f8f29 Then his friend said, 'If you fly you will save a day.' He nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his ticket, he would save a day. I ask you what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved from what? for what? Instead of spending the day traveling, you will see your friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you will travel home twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will fly home and again save a day? Save it form what, for what? You will begin work a day earlier, but you cannot work on indefinitely. It only means that you will cease work a day earlier. And then, what? You cannot die a day earlier. So you will realize perhaps how rash it was of you to save a day, when you discover how you cannot escape those twenty-four hours you have so carefully preserved; you may push them forward and push them forward, but some time they must be spend, and then you may wish you had spent them as innocently as in the train from Ostend. time travel Graham Greene
689731a Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will - whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.... journeys travel Lawrence Durrell
ed7a2db You cannot avoid hearing drums in Haiti. travel Zora Neale Hurston
6afff51 Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on. reading travel wisdom Tahir Shah
d97c339 "Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves," said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word "track" in Tibetan: shul, "a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by - a footprint for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night." travel Rebecca Solnit
6fb5d0d ...I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival... travel Rebecca Solnit
c23bb41 One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast. golden-gate-bridge longing mount-tamalpais san-francisco travel wanderlust Rebecca Solnit
a86ac4d "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")" street travel Mervyn Peake
37fccd3 Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape... travel Alain de Botton
e6d6ba1 Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants, minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5) The acquaintance with new species of the human race--- their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.' What may be accomplished in a lifetime---and seldom or never is. accomplish-the-impossible alexander-von-humboldt explorers philosophy scientists travel Alain de Botton
50e4ea9 The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it. ayers-rock travel Bill Bryson
905a7be One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene. travel Tahir Shah
f22a331 I had learned years ago never to give original documents to anyone if I could help it. travel Tahir Shah
44c16a8 The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after tow minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless. friends friendship travel Tahir Shah
8141c4e Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom. india travel Tahir Shah
a53b3be "It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, "Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election." humor non-fiction politics short-stories travel David Sedaris
ab79f98 Because I was alone, however, even the mundane seemed charged with meaning. The ice looked colder and more mysterious, the sky a cleaner shade of blue. The unnamed peaks towering over the glacier were bigger and comelier and infinitely more menacing than they would have been were I in the company of another person. And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal. inspirational travel Jon Krakauer
b76759c "Boredom presents a very real, if insidious peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington post:"Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound...Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly." The backcountry traveler, then, in addition to developing such skills as the use of a map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blisters, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredom, lest his tail grow scaly." boredom mountains travel Jon Krakauer
eea9bfa It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme. travel wanderlust Jon Krakauer
cdd5797 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. concentration gratitude travel Paul Theroux
e43a30e If you don't learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you'll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting. fear living travel Elizabeth Gilbert
f29422b 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. south-america travel travel-writing Paul Theroux
ffada7f "Not town can live peacefully, whatever its laws," Plato wrote, "when its citizens ... do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love." But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?" peace travel Elizabeth Gilbert
7d8e4a5 So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to 'get somewhere' it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves. inspirational travel Robert M. Pirsig
54d0f47 ... none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something that I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and were blind. exposure soviet-russia travel Martha Gellhorn
e6f85f4 What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are. culture history science travel Wade Davis
b30f0bc "...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." angst city crime crowd love new-jersey pollution teenagers travel urban Rebecca McNutt
43c4390 This is stupid. Very, very stupid. I don't even have a tear-stained dog to wave bye to me. But I told everyone I was gonna do this, so I gotta do it... or I will be living a life of feminist-sounding somedays. And I will be more responsible, powerful, and amazing afterward. I will be able to do anything and not self-consciously stare at elevator numbers when the doors close. I will look the other person in right the eye and nod hello. love radical travel Erika Lopez
7447d00 Even in Africa, I had never seen such a profusion of stars as I saw on these clear nights on Pacific isles - not only big beaming planets and small single pinpricks... but also glittering clouds of them - the whole dome of the sky crowded with thick shapes formed from stars, overlaid with more shapes, a brilliant density, like a storm of light over a black depthless sea, made brighter still by twisting auroras composed of tiny star grains - points of light so fine and numerous they seemed like luminous vapor, the entire sky hung with veils of light like dazzling smoke... they made night in Oceania as vast and dramatic as day. beauty constellations nature night oceania stars travel Paul Theroux
fb0c268 "not all who wander are lost a poem called "Wander, wander, wandering meandering, the urge to roam, to dance, to fly, to be, the search for free, the need to see to go to find to search to do, my thirsts so easily quenched so close to home and yours so grand, so elegant, so marvellous, climbing mountaintops and elephants and tiger hunts and dancing bears and far off stars and trips to mars and all of it so wild, so vast, so free, as you go wander, wander, wandering, and then the best part of all when, satisfied, complete, and happy now, you wander slowly fiction travel Danielle Steel 'wanderlust'
ff3242d Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far). arrivals travel Alain de Botton
c791a1f One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds. movement travel worlds Alain de Botton
9af2c5e If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not. travel walking words Rebecca Solnit
8087504 Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe. nature roadtrip travel wanderlust Rebecca Solnit
a5d8984 ... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. travel wanderlust Rebecca Solnit
7d7df70 In the meantime, there is not an hour to lose. I am about to visit the public library. hour hurry jules-verne library professor-hardwigg public-library reading travel Jules Verne
75acb31 But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, say you? Perhaps so;...Truly, would you not for less than that go around the world? travel Jules Verne
24f9047 That's what books are for, to travel without moving an inch. reading travel Jhumpa Lahiri
7c0acb4 Well, I like to know where I'm going before I try to get there. It's a mistake to try to execute a plan before you've thought of one, in my experience. planning plans thinking travel Max Barry
33fdad3 What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight. travel Emily St. John Mandel
1ddad35 I didn't get the impression that the policeman cared much about the whole thing either. After another thirty minutes of ruthless interrogation ('Can you ve'fy you eat banan' pancake?') he let me go asking me not to leave Khao San within 24 hours thailand travel Alex Garland
3f02975 Or we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to put things into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out of our hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right. We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning. experience inspirational life strength travel Ray Bradbury
0f7af09 There was nothing along the road save the country it traversed and there was nothing in the country at all. travel Cormac McCarthy
4544ed1 As if I already had some inkling of my own future fate, I was most moved by those of the people here who had no homeland, or even worse, had not just one but two or three, and privately still did not feel sure where they belonged. travel Stefan Zweig
9617184 Everything is old, here. We are old - the Masters. experienced old-age travel wisdom Ursula K. Le Guin
d9f05c1 The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone. humor travel David Rakoff
848496e "Zweig, who had made frequent journeys around Italy before World War l, was delighted to discover that "the Germans, formerly the largest contingent of travelers, are reduced to a modest number, among whom only the 'Thomas Mann German, the quiet, cultivated one' is to be found." meta-quote pre-world-war-i stefan-zweig thomas-mann travel Sabine Arque
4e3699a If you think it's bad now, my friend, wait till we reach a town!' He shook his head and brushed at his tattered, dirty shirtsleeve. 'Do try to remember we're visitors-and not welcome ones-if you should feel moved to reason with anyone. foreign foreigner foreigners humor humours reason travel traveling unfriendly visitor David Weber
1858283 To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. - Tochee travel Peter F. Hamilton
6dfa1d4 What happened to me? I asked myself. Morris's high, smoky voice took me back to my university years, when I thought rich people were evil, a shirt and tie were prison clothes, and life without freedom to get up and go - motorcycle beneath you, breeze in your face, down the streets of Paris, into the mountains of Tibet - was not a good life at all. What happened to me? free ideal life thought travel young Mitch Albom
ff6f35f At the same time she felt a tremendous, consuming, uncertainty that cancelled out everything, that left her with nothing...She had come to that city looking for another version of herself, a transfiguration. But she understood that her identity was insidious, a root that she would never be able to pull up, a prison in which she would be trapped. Al tempo stesso sentiva un'incertezza tremenda che la consumava, che cancellava tutto, che la lasciava senza nulla...Era venuta in questa citta cercando un'altra versioe di se, una transfigurazione. Ma aveva capito che la sua identita era insidiosa, una radice che lei non sarebbe mai riuscita a estirpare, un carcere in cui si sarebbe incastrata. language-as-a-form-of-travel search-for-self travel why-people-travel Jhumpa Lahiri
d31d579 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... namibia tourism tourist travel Paul Theroux
033162c People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice. observations-on-humanity tourism travel wild-west yellowstone Robert M. Pirsig
4af062a There are two kinds of women in this world, my dear. Those who wave goodbye to others starting on grand adventures and those waving back from the window of a train or the deck of a ship. - Ophelia Higginbotham travel traveler women Victoria Alexander
e00c17f It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death...I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation. styron travel William Styron
3c630e6 It is easy when you are young to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough it is your God-given right to have it... I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong in my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing...I came to appreciate that mountains make poor recepticles for dreams. dreams risk travel Jon Krakauer
1d8aa3a "If you love good roads, conveniences, good inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as to never go into Sussex. We thought ourselves in the northest part of England; the whole country has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage." - To George Montagu, Esq., August 26, 1749" insult sussex travel Horace Walpole
ed83882 If Kumar had his way they would leave for Fiji every year just before Thanksgiving and not return until the New Year rang in and the decorations came down. They would swim with the fishes and lie on the beach eating papaya. On the years they were tired of Fiji they would go to Bali or Sydney or any sunny, sandy place whose name contained an equal number of consonants and vowels. holidays travel Ann Patchett
1c02f8d We trifle with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalize over Italy and ecstacise over Spain- but England we love. european-travel travel Frances Hodgson Burnett
f9a4a81 She knew better than to lose her head over a man. That was what was so humiliating: she knew better. Three broken engagements had taught her that a woman needed to keep her wits about her when dealing with the male species, or she could get seriously hurt. escapism sadness travel wanderlust Linda Howard
0eba18f England resembles a ship in its shape' wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Traits. He was wrong... England, of course, resembles a pig, with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; its snout is the south-west in Wales, and its reaching trotters are Cornwall, and its rump is East Anglia. The whole of Britain looks like a witch riding on a pig, and these contours - rump and snout and bonnet, and the scowling face of Western Scotland - were my route. geography humor travel Paul Theroux
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