c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
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.
— Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not the destination where you end up but the mishaps and memories you create along the way!
— Penelope Riley, Travel Absurdities
Yet all experience is an arch wherethroughGleams that untraveled world whose margin fadesForever and forever when I move.How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!As though to breathe were life!
— Alfred Tennyson
Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?
— Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero
It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia. Just for a few days!
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.
— Edna Ferber, Gigolo
The journey not the arrival matters.
— T.S. Eliot
Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.
— Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit
what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.
— Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.
— Bill Bryson
Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.
— Clive Barker, The Thief of Always
You can't control the past, but you can control where you go next.
— Kirsten Hubbard, Wanderlove
The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.
— Guillermo del Toro
Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you.
— Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
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.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddharta
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.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Across galaxies of time and spaceTravelling just to see your faceLost amidst the countless starsTo bring me back to where you are.
— Bryce Anderson
Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure.
— Antonio Porchia
I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.
— Rick Steves
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.
— Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
I don't want to go to Peru."How do you know? You've never been there."I've never been to hell either and I'm pretty sure I don't want to go there.
— Richard Paul Evans, The Sunflower
How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.
— Sarah Reijonen, Country Girl: Letting Love & Wanderlust Take the Reins
Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
I am looking for the people who have always been there, and belong to the places they live. The others I do not wish to see.
— Norman Lewis
I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.
— Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles
People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American.
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
— Pico Iyer
..luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of travelling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living – indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.
— Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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?
My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the whole earth.I have look'd for equals and lovers an found them ready for me in all lands,I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...
— Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.
— Elizabeth Bowen
All night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly--not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things the outer limits would suffice.
— Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
This wasn't a strange place
—  it was a new one.
We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
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.
‎I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.
— Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
I knew then that I wanted to go home, but I had no home to go to--and that is what adventures are all about.
— Trina Schart Hyman, Self Portrait, Trina Schart Hyman
The journey is the destination.
— Dan Eldon
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.
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road
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.
— Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place: Mediterranean Writings edited by A.G.Thomas
Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.
— Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals
Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
— John Ruskin
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time"....
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we'd probably learn twice as much.
— Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place
I probably did too much thinking in India. I blame it on the roads, for they were superb...
— Robert Edison Fulton Jr., One Man Caravan
We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey;
— John Hope Franklin
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.
— Robin McKinley, Imaginary Lands
Rule number one: wear loose clothing. No Problem. Rule number two: no alcohol for the next three days. Slight problem. I'll miss my evening glass of wine but figure I can go for three days without and compensate later.And the last rule: absolutely no coffee or tea or caffeine of any kind.Big problem. This rule hits me like a sucker punch and sure would have knocked me to the floor had I not been sitting there already. I'm eying the exits, plotting my escape. I knew enlightenment came at a price, but i had no idea the price was this steep. A sense of real panic sets in. How am I going to survive for the next seventy-two hours without a single cup of coffee?
— Eric    Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World
You are what you inhabit.
— Lawrence Millman, Last Places: A Journey in the North
I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.It was just where I went.
— Robert Penn Warren
Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: 'Journeys to recover your future?'And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and willnever have.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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.
— Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth
Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.
— Thor Heyerdahl
Anyone who needs more than one suitcase is a tourist, not a traveler
— Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
— Bashō Matsuo
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!
— Rudyard Kipling, Debits And Credits
You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home.
— Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone's home and backyard.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.
— Albert Camus
You can handle just about anything that comes at you out on the road with a believable grin, common sense and whiskey.
— Bill  Murray, Common Sense and Whiskey
One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.
— Amin Maalouf, Leo Africanus
Yeah, that’s my experience. Humbling to the point where you have major regrets about some of the stupid things you said, some of the things you thought were right. You keep going to these countries, and it’s like, you forgot the lesson from the last time. Because the first person you encounter kind of bitch-slaps you upside the head in the most wonderful, innocent way and you realize, God, I’m still an asshole. And this guy, by doing nothing except being broke and so incredibly polite—it takes you aback, you realize, I’m still not there yet. I still have like eight miles to go before I can even get into the parking lot of humility. I have to keep going back. It’s like going back to a chiropractor to get a readjustment. That’s me in Africa, that’s me in Southeast Asia. You come back humbled and you bring that into your life. It’s made me much more tolerant of other peoples—and I’m not saying I used to be a misogynist, or I used to be a racist, that was never my problem. But I can be extremely headstrong, impatient, rude. Like, “Hurry up, man. What’s your problem? Get out of my way.” That sentiment comes easy to me. Going to these countries, you realize none of that is necessary, none of it’s cool, it’s nothing Abraham Lincoln would do, and so why are you doing it? Those are the lessons I’ve learned.
— Henry Rollins
Night falls over Machu Picchu to the sound of Abba's 'Dancing Queen'.
— Michael Palin, Full Circle
One thing that I love about traveling is feeling disoriented and removed from my comfort zone.
— Sarah Glidden, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less
I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
But that’s the wonderful thing about foreign travel, suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most basic sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross the street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
— Bill Bryan
There's something in the act of setting out that renews me, that fills me with a feeling of possibility. On the road, I'm forced to rely on instinct and intuition, on the kindness of strangers, in ways that illuminate who I am, ways that shed light on my motivations, my fears.
— Andrew McCarthy, The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down
Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.
— Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Paris was all so... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French!
— David Nicholls, Us
Streets flooded. Please advise.
— Robert Benchley
Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
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.
— Don DeLillo, The Names
London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.
— G.K. Chesterton
Wish you were here, we can get lost in the forest together and eat bamboo rice.
— Winna Efendi, The Journeys
Where you come from does matter -- but not nearly as much as where you are headed.
— Jodi Picoult
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.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels.
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
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.
— Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself
I know it's not strictly sex that accounts for my straying the motive usually attributed to men. I think it's just too tempting to have two lives rather than one. Some people think that too much travel begets infidelity: Separation and opportunity test the bonds of love. I think it's more likely that people who hate to make choices to settle on one thing or another are attracted to travel. Travel doesn't beget a double life. The appeal of the double life begets travel.
— Elisabeth Eaves, Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents
You cannot keep something down that is bound to rise.
— Juliet C. Obodo, Writer's Retreat: New York City Edition: Cafes, Restaurants & Coffee Shops for Writers, Bloggers & Students
Nights are long when it's cold and you're waiting for a train.
— Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, Wandering Star
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.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
London on your own actually seems more exotic than Egypt on a tour.
— Laura Fraser, An Italian Affair
This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.
— Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of  Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
The storm long past, the night sky was beset with stars. Pointing upward, I asked her to pick a point of light and stay with it. Standing up, I eased Sara to her feet. Whispering into her ear, I asked, “Have you ever stood under a star... and felt the earth move under your feet?” - The Judas Syndrome
— Michael Poeltl, The Judas Syndrome
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.
— Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom: Stories
I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing faith and a belief in astonishment. And if by accident, I could make a volcano in a single test tube, then what could I do with all the strange magnificent elements of the world with its infinity of unknowns, with the swarm of man, with civilization, with language?
— Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation. 
— Elizabeth Drew
The open road. Seemingly my only friend for years upon end since leaving war. The road embraced me, let me breathe, and more importantly, did not judge me.
— M.B. Dallocchio
Just because I am paranoid does not mean that someone is not out to get me
— Don Darkes, 6692 Pisces the Sailfish
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.
— Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps
Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!
— Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.
— Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
[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.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen
At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly - not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.
— Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.
— William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
All of us,' he said, 'have hopes of being poet, artist, discoverer, philospoher, scientist; of possessing the attributes of all these simultaneously. Few are permitted to achieve any of them in daily life. But in travel we attain them all. Then we have our day of glory, when all our dreams come true, when we can be anything we like, as long as we like, and, when we are tired of it, pull up stakes and move on. Travel -- the solitude of the mountains, the emptiness of the desert, the delicacy of the minaret; eternal change, limitless contrast, unending variety.' (Eric Lang)
— Robert Edison Fulton Jr., One Man Caravan
will I ever get over the pull I feel to both of these places?
— Sara Ferguson
A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.
— Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.
— Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.
— Alice Munro, The Progress of Love
It's hard to be less than happy when you can be happy with less.
— Chris Brady, A Month of Italy: Rediscovering the Art of Vacation
These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind
— Hilaire Belloc, First and Last
And guess what? I have to admit.. I kinda start liking it here.
— Winna Efendi, The Journeys
Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.
— Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
No doubt you are wondering what you will find, out there.' The Commandant said it for me.'Well, it would be useless for me to try and tell you. The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it...
— Robert Edison Fulton Jr., One Man Caravan
Always stay sharp on railways and cruise ships for transit has a way of making everything clear.
— Anna Godbersen, Envy
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.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's
There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient
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.)
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh.
— Isabella L. Bird, Adventures in the Rocky Mountains
When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.
— Frank Delaney, Ireland
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
— Freya Stark
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.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?
— Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974
[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.
— Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road
The desert doesn't care who you are, and neither does anyone or anything who lives in it.
— Deanne Stillman, Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango
The idea of my heart dancing with delight was far too good to pass up.
— Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself
I wish she’d said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can’t hide from it, not even here.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Globalization by the way of McDonald’s and KFC has captured the hearts, the minds, and from what I can see through the window, the growing bellies of the folks here.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
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.
— Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself
Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
— Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote
The great glory of travel, to me, is not just what I see that's new to me in countries visited, but that in almost every one of them I change from an outsider looking in to an insider looking out.
— Clara E. Laughlin, Traveling Through Life
Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters.
— Jan Wong, Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now
They say life is a highway and we all travel our own roads, some good, some bad, yet each is a blessing of its own.
— Jess "Chief" Brynjulson
...all the disadvantages of good roads: high speed, and almost total lack of that inspiring factor in travel -- the welcoming hand of the interested stranger.
— Robert Edison Fulton Jr., One Man Caravan
I nearer than I was yesterday and further than I am today, tomorrow I'll be square one.
— Racquel McDonnell
A wise man travels to discover himself.
— James Russell Lowell
Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, inexplicable and impenetrable, at any view, instantly seen and always, always delightful? Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
— Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.
— William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi
You sell off the kingdom piece by piece and trade it for a horse that will take you anywhere.
— Colin Wright, My Exile Lifestyle
Far too many people on the spectrum spend most of their days with people who carry around memories of, and are often too overwhelmed by incidents of, prior misinterpretation. This is no fun. In travel you can start over, and reinvent yourself. If somehow a relationship gets weird, you can leave and go to the next town, the next block, or whatever the case may be, and try again.
— Michael John Carley, Asperger's From the Inside Out: A Supportive and Practical Guide for Anyone with Asperger's Syndrome
As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.
— E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
If travel has momentum and wants to stay in motion, as I mentioned earlier, then adventure has the gravitational pull of a black hole. The more you do it, the more you find a way to keep doing it.
— Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter
He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us!
— David Sedaris, Naked
Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
— William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
Those horses must have been Spanish jennets, born of mares mated with a zephyr; for they went as swiftly as the wind, and the moon, which had risen at our departure to give us light, rolled through the sky like a wheel detached from its carriage...
— Théophile Gautier, Clarimonde
The world isn't built with a ramp.
— Walt Balenovich, Travels in a Blue Chair: Alaska to Zambia Ushuaia to Uluru
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.
— Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island
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.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
I lack the imagination. For that reason I have to pack, stuff into my pockets odds and ends, passport, money, and go see what it's really like. Whenever the time of year or the weather changes, I have to pack up whatever I can't do without and visit all those places I've been before, to make sure they still exist
— Andrzej Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe
Where can one buy a lit of that *Right Stuff* bravado required to shrug off the fact that your airplane is now a convertible?
— Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter
Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight. It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves unclose, the dead are raised; thoughts, feelings, memories that slept, are seen by me ascending from the clods--haloed most of them--but while I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to ascertain definitely their outline, the sound which wakened them dies, and they sink, each and all, like a light wreath of mist, absorbed in the mould, recalled to urns, resealed in monuments.
— Charlotte Brontë, The Professor
Ultimately, I found my instincts mirrored in a line from Thoreau: 'My needle...always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more exhausted and richer on that side.
— Phillip Connors
There, Clover found the "gardens and great trees and old cottages...so beautiful" that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, "this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels.
— Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life
the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature
— Graham Greene
We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.
— D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
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.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.
— A.A. Gill
For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which--we are told--a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome.
— Lawrence Osborne
To me, travel is more valuable than any stupid piece of bling money can buy.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
What's supposed to happen, at the end of a quest? Cheers and accolades, Josh knew; people throw their hats in the air, and you glow with pride as they lift you to their shoulders. What else? Medals, speeches and a great feast, and then a ballad about your exploits, and finally, as the fireworks go off overhead, a soft, clean, fresh bed.
— Isabel Hoving, The Dream Merchant
It is easier to bear the worries of wandering than to find peace in your hometown, where only the sage can live in a happy house surrounded by trite troubles and daily distractions.
— Hermann Hesse