c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Somewhere nere Ogallala, about six hours into that majestic, maddening prairie, I realize that half an hour has passed since I've seen a vehicle in either direction.Oh, I think, as I finally see a pair of headlights draw nigh in the eastbound lane, so this must be where the West begins.
— Lily Burana, Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America
To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.
— Bill Bryson
Hip-hop...has been the proverbial key that’s opened the door for me to roam this breathtaking planet.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The people of North America have little idea of religion, but they have strict public morality. The Latin people are without morality but they are highly religious.
— Patrick Marnham, So Far from God: A Journey to Central America
I don't know how many years it was before I arrived at a formulated philosophy that the happiest thing to do, always, when visiting an individual or a country, is to admit, by word or manner, how much I'm finding there that my life had lacked hitherto
— Clara E. Laughlin
Honestly, if I stay on this gruelling path, I'm going to end up as another suicide statistic.
— S.A. Tawks, Misadventurous
I walked down Paseo del Prado, losing myself to the sights, sounds, and dense magic of the city. There's something weirdly calming about being alone in a big city. It made me feel like the universe was hugely generous, and that my species was so damn smart to have constructed such a beautiful city.
— Kate Klise, In the Bag
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
— Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Running, you should know, is a kind of stillness.
— Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape from a Leper Colony
Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.
— E.M. Forster
That's because true travel, the kind with no predetermined end, is one of the most selfish endeavors we can possibly undertake-an act in which we focus solely on our own fulfillment, with little regard to those we leave behind. After all, we're the ones venturing out into the big crazy world, filling up journals, growing like weeds. And we have the gall to think they're just sitting at home, soaking in security and stability.It is only when we reopen these wrapped and ribboned boxes, upon our triumphant return home, that we discover nothing is the way we had left it before.
— Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana
There is no happiness for him who does not travel, Rohita!Thus we have heard. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner… therefore, wander!… The fortune of him who is sitting, sits; it rises when he rises; it sleeps when he sleeps; it moves when he moves. Therefore, wander!
— Aitareya Brahmanan in the Rigveda
Why do you need that thing?" September asked. "None of the airports back home have them.""They do. You just can't see them right," Betsy Basilstalk said with a grin. "All customs agents have them, otherwise, why would people agree to stand in line and be peered at and inspected? We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say, lines on maps are silly. Where you live, the awful machinery is smaller, harder to see. Less honest, that's all. Whereas Rupert here? He's as honest as they come. Does what it says on the box.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.
— Tahir Shah, House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
It was an awkward moment. We were burning down our host's house, a situation which any guest seeks to avoid.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
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.
— Tahir Shah, Beyond The Devil's Teeth
A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.
— Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself
The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you
— Freya Stark
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.
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
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.
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost should seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
For me, boviscopophobia (=the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
— David Foster Wallace
As anyone who's ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
…”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.”…
— E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
I had learned years ago never to give original documents to anyone if I could help it.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.
— Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself
His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by making them last only hours or days, rather than years and decades. People on a train form an alliance, as if the world that surrounded the parallel rails were hostile and and they refugees from it. The dining car, humming and rocking gently in the night, annihilated past and future and made all associations outside of itself seem vaguely unreal. So they welcomed him at their table, for he was one of them, a traveler, not one of those wraiths through whose night-lit cities they passed.
— Alexander Jablokov, Carve the Sky
That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.
— Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
— Paul Theroux
Adventrue rewrites the routine of our lives and wakes us sharply from the comforts of the familiar. It allows us to see how vast the expanse of our experience. Our ability to grow is no longer linear but becomes unrestricted to any direction we wish to run.
— Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter
A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation
— Tahir Shah, Sorcerer's Apprentice
Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.
— Tahir Shah, Sorcerer's Apprentice
When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy!
— Barbara Conelli
...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.
— Michael   Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
If you write about a place, you need to be right about the place!
— Laurence Bradbury
If I'm not on a cruise, I'm either thinking about my last one or planning my next!
— Beth
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.
— Tahir Shah, Sorcerer's Apprentice
What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.
— Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
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.
— Tahir Shah, Sorcerer's Apprentice
It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite.A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.
— Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands: Hawaii in the 1860s
I heard wordOf bellied sailcloth,Creak of oars,And gold in Eastland.Then I smelledA smell remembered:Salt of sprayAnd black-pitched boat's keel.
— Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships
I wanted to write an adventure story, not, it's true, I really did. I shall have failed, that's all. Adventures bore me. I have no idea how to talk about countries, how to make people wish they had been there. I am not a good travelling salesman. Countries? Where are they , whatever became of them.When I was twelve I dreamed of Hongkong. That tedious, commonplace little provincial town! Shops sprouting from every nook and cranny! The Chinese junks pictured on the lids of chocolate boxes used to fascinate me. Junks: sort of chopped-off barges, where the housewives do all their cooking and washing on deck. They even have television. As for the Niagara Falls: water, nothing but water! A dam is more interesting; at least one can occasionally see a big crack at its base, and hope for some excitement.When one travels, one sees nothing but hotels. Squalid rooms, with iron bedsteads, and a picture of some kind hanging on the wall from a rusty nail, a coloured print of London Bridge or the Eiffel Tower.One also sees trains, lots of trains, and airports that look like restaurants, and restaurants that look like morgues. All the ports in the world are hemmed in by oil slicks and shabby customs buildings. In the streets of the towns, people keep to the sidewalks, cars stop at red lights. If only one occasionally arrived in a country where women are the colour of steel and men wear owls on their heads. But no, they are sensible, they all have black ties, partings to one side, brassières and stiletto heels. In all the restaurants, when one has finished eating one calls over the individual who has been prowling among the tables, and pays him with a promissory note. There are cigarettes everywhere! There are airplanes and automobiles everywhere.
— Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, The Book of Flights
A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea...Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don't go right now, we're never going to do it. And we'll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.
— Tim Cahill
Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.
— Richard Davenport-Hines, Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From
I heard a choking sound behind me. When I looked back, Cannoli was hanging from the backpack harness with her hind legs circling frantically in the air. She looked like she was riding a bike just above ground level. "Cannoli," I yelled. I unhooked her and made sure she was breathing on her own. When I tried to get her back in the backpack, she whimpered. I talked to her soothingly yet firmly, then tried again. This time she started howling like I was hurting her.  People turned and stared as they walked by. "What are you looking at?" I said to one couple. I suddenly felt true remorse for every time I'd stared at a parent with a toddler throwing a tantrum. I made a vow to be a better aunt to Tulia's kids if I ever made it out of this parking garage. I pleaded with Cannoli one more time.
— Claire Cook, Summer Blowout
The trip from Portland to New York City was like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. It went on and on, and by the time you reached your destination, there was no sensation left in your extremities.
— Kristin Hannah, Distant Shores
It is my hope that this book will help to demystify the origins of travel writing and show that when thousands of travelers follow a guidebook word-for-word, recommendation-for-recommendation, it not only harms contemporary international travel but can also do serious harm to places in developing countries.
— Thomas Kohnstamm, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism
You can leave Hong Kong, but it will never leave you.
— Nury Vittachi, Hong Kong: The City of Dreams
The map? I will first make it.
— Patrick White, Voss
Foreign lands never yield their secrets to a traveller. The best they offer are tantalising snippets, just enough to inflame the imagination. The secrets they do reveal are your own - the ones you have kept from yourself. And this is reason enough to travel, to leave home.
— Graeme Sparkes
After Supper the Master dismissed all except Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie and Sha the Monk. He took them out with him and said, "Look at that wonderful moolight. It makes me long for the time when I can return home.
— Wu Cheng'en, Monkey: The Journey to the West
Traveling in other countries is especially fun because others often attribute your differences to the less-stigmatizing idea that you're like this only because you're a foreigner.
— Michael John Carley, Asperger's From the Inside Out: A Supportive and Practical Guide for Anyone with Asperger's Syndrome
...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.
— Jim Fergus, The Wild Girl
I suppose that every wanderer started in a garden somewhere. So few of us are born into motion.
— Candas Jane Dorsey, Black Wine
There is nothing more exasperating than reading in contemporary guidebooks disparagements of places that are deemed to be "seedy." Do the writers not notice that such places are invariably crowded with people? When a neighborhood is described as "seedy" by some Lonely Planet prude, I immediately head there.
— Lawrence Osborne, The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall
Celebrities are like infants. Neither can wipe their own ass.
— Michael Brian
[E]very journey is played out between standstill and flight.
— Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea
The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
— Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
I am compelled into this country.
— Patrick White, Voss
I sometimes rented a car and drove from event to event in Europe; a road trip was a great escape from the day-to-day anxieties of playing, and it kept me from getting too lost in the tournament fun house with its courtesy cars, caterers, locker room attendants, and such  all amenities that create a firewall between players and what you might call the 'real' world  you know, where you may have to read a map, ask a question in a foreign tongue, find a restaurant and read the menu posted in the window to make sure you're not about to walk into a joint that serves only exotic reptile meat.
— Patrick McEnroe, Hardcourt Confidential: Tales from Twenty Years in the Pro Tennis Trenches
Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.
— Diane Johnson
The Pacific, greatest of oceans, has an area exceeding that of all dry land on the planet. Herman Melville called it "the tide-beating heart of earth." Covering more than a third of the planet's surface--as much as the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans combined--it's the largest geographical feature in the world. Its awesome 165,384,000 square km (up to 16,000 km wide and 11,000 km long) have an average depth of around 4,000 meters. Half the world's liquid water is stored here. You could drop the entire dry landmass of our planet into the Pacific and still have room for another continent the size of Asia. One theory claims the moon may have been flung from the Pacific while the world was still young.
— David   Stanley, Moon Handbooks South Pacific
To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street.
— Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea
There are many hostelries in his report, which is the true account of an expedition.
— Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea
Dad reckons if you have a great time in one place, then that's a good reason for never going back. Nothing will ever measure up to the first time. He laughs at people who go to the same place every year, same beach, same house, same things to do.
— James Moloney, Angela
It takes time to see the desert; you have to keep looking at it. When you've looked long neough, you realise the blank wastes of sand and rock are teemming with life. Just as you can keep looking at a person and suddenly realise that the way you see them has completely changed: from being a stranger, they've gradually revealed themselves as someone with a wealth of complexities and surprising subtleties that you're growing to love. 
— Annie Caulfield
From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations.In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)
— Christopher Kremmer, The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes
No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.
— J. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet And Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70
But wherever there is man, there must be some sort of route
— Robert Edison Fulton Jr., One Man Caravan
In London it had seemed impossible to travel without the proper evening clothes. One could see an invitation arriving for an Embassy ball or something. But on the other side of Europe with the first faint tinges of faraway places becoming apparent and exciting, to say nothing of vanishing roads and extra weight, Embassy balls held less significance.
— Robert Edison Fulton Jr., One Man Caravan
I thought back to Europe, where this journey began, then to Berkeley and even Madison, where the plans were first hatched. I thought about how the road led through Amsterdam, Paris and Greece, how for Guy and Sarah it continued through Central Asia, and how for me it detoured through East Africa. I thought about how many people had started off on this same journey, and how few had made it this far. I thought about how, of all the possible destinations this was the farthest outpost, the most remote spot of all - Kathmandu was the end of the road.
— Terry Tarnoff, The Bone Man of Benares: A Lunatic Trip Through Love and the World
After a day on Mykines, I changed my mind about life not going on. A sort of life was going on, beating with a reasonalbe version of a pulse, but that life consisted for the most part of travelers like myself. There were maybe a dozen of us -- one third of the island's population. Our tribe could only increase as the Mykines tribe dwindled away, a few falling down steps, most simply emigrating, until there would be, sad to say, only our peripatetic selves. We were the future of all places condemned by remoteness to a lingering, photogenic death.
— Lawrence Millman, Last Places: A Journey in the North
So now it’s this thing I do.I go away, ever so often, by myself, for myself,to new places with foreign streets I haven’t walked yet,and there I wander, up and down, watching people going places I don’t knowand it always hits me that they’re never alone,always with someone,and I wonder how they would spend a day all on their own in a foreign city with nothing to do and no one to see,and I wonder if they’d be happy.Just simply being free,like I am trying to be.Happy.Just simply being me.
— Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine
She smiled, and said, “Take care that the voice of God and the Devil sound one in the same in the desert. Trust your instincts. You were not put on this earth to be naïve, blindly optimistic, or passive; you are here to be vigilant, to survive.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Horizons, cheap whisky straight from the bottleand your hands in mine.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.' The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside -- a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.
— William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.
— Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat
The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out the night cries of the cicadas, the crickets, and the nightjars. Behind us, a plume of dust burned pink in our rear lights.
— Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat
Keep going, because there is nothing worse in this world than to stop. Simply keep flying ❤️
— vidhya thakkar
A traveller with an open mind grows richer with each journey, with each encounter, with each conversation.
— Jane Wilson-Howarth
To walk through unknown streets in cities where you are merely learning the language is to force yourself into a new state of hypervigilance. You are a traveler, and hopefully not just a tourist, and must appear calm, but maintain your bearings. Not to get too lost, too off course and without alternatives, without an escape plan in the event of a dangerous situation.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Travel can sometimes push us to lose ourselves and find ourselves at once. The shedding of old prejudices, dead skin, and the opening of one’s eyes is far better than what any mainstream news outlet could ever tell you.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
On life’s journey, every person met, every place, every new word, language, scent & sound changes the traveller a little: forms who they are and whom they become
— Jane Wilson-Howarth
Pack your bags and move cities and countries. Nothing will enrich you than travel does.
— Nikita Dudani
A port arrival makes you feel so free ...To realize what it is to be a free man, with a world before him;
— Barnaby Allen, Pacific Viking
The purpose of a pilgrimage is about setting aside a long period of time in which the only focus is to be the matters of the soul. Many believe a pilgrimage is about going away but it isn’t; it is about coming home. Those who choose to go on pilgrimage have already ventured away from themselves; and now set out in a longing to journey back to who they are. Many a time we believe we must go away from all that is familiar if we are to focus on our inner well-being because we feel it is the only way to escape all that drains and distracts us, allowing us to turn inward and tend to what ails us. Yet we do not need to go to the edges of the earth to learn who we are, only the edges of ourself.
— L.M. Browning, Seasons of Contemplation: A Book of Midnight Meditations
I live to leave.
— Judith Fein, Life Is a Trip: The Transformative Magic of Travel
My ideal journey: set out early and never arrive.
— Marty Rubin
Your body travels sometimes to somewhere but your mind travels every time to everywhere!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If we were meant to stay in one place, we would have roots instead of feet.
— Rachel Wolchin
If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Walk on the path of lights.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Clever and civilized men will not stay homeLeave your homeland and explore foreign fieldsGo out! You shall find replacement for those you have leftGive your all, the sweetness of life will be tasted after the struggleI have seen that standing water stagnatesIf it flows, it is pure, if it does not, it will become murkyIf the lion doesn’t leave his den, he will not eatIf the arrow does not leave the bow, it will not strikeIf the sun stands still in its orbitMan will tire of itGold dust merely soil before excavatedAloewood is just ordinary wood if in the forestTravel by Imam Syafii
— Ahmad Fuadi, Negeri 5 Menara
Travel is an urge best cultivated from within.
— Rough Guides, The Rough Guide to First-Time Europe
Approach a trip as a chance to collect unique experiences, not passport stamps, postcards and snapshots in front of famous monuments.
— Rough Guides, The Rough Guide to First-Time Europe
Blessed are the curious, for they shall have adventures.
— Lovelle Drachman
What constitutes the pleasure of the traveler is the obstacle, the fatigue, the peril itself. What pleasure can there be in an excursion where one is always sure of arriving, finding ready horses, a soft bed, an excellent supper, and all the comforts one can enjoy at home. One of the great misfortunes of modern life is the lack of the sudden surprise, the absence of all adventures. Everything is so well regulated, so well meshed, so well labeled, that chance is no longer possible; another century of perfection, and each one will be able to foresee, from the day of his birth, what will happen to him until the day of his death. Human will will be completely annihilated. No more crimes, no more virtues, no more physiognomies, no more originality. It will become impossible to distinguish a Russian from a Spaniard, an Englishman from a Chinese, a Frenchman from an American. People will not even be able to recognize one another, for everyone will be same. Then an immense boredom will seize the universe, and suicide will decimate the population of the globe, for the principal spring of life—curiosity—will have been destroyed forever.
— Théophile Gautier
Sometimes, you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable.
— Colin Thubron
The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, acclaimed as the most brilliant and perceptive reporter of his time, writes in "Travels with Herodotus" that with every new town visited, with every new foreign word learnt, the traveller experiences small, almost imperceptible personal changes. Wherever you go becomes part of you and the person who returns home is never the same as before departing. Knowing new people is in many ways like travelling, and those who you meet along your road become part of your existence too.
— Mateo Cabello, Of Mountains and Men
Make a u-turn, when you see you have traveled on the wrong path.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
He who claims to have travelled in the hard roads, let him show his shoes for the proof!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I had a heady dream of loving her, as if she were an actress on a stage of my own making; and as the night wore on, my imaginings wandered into make-believe, and died beyond the tent of the mosquito net, where Vincent was snoring, and the African stars were shining in through our lone window, and nothing was quite real.
— Colin Thubron, Night of Fire
Spain is more vegan-friendly than you've been led to believe. The truth is, most places are.
— Wendy Werneth
A CITY IS AS much a state of mind as a place—a set of perceptions of place. On the last train home to Mullaghbrack or Gortyfarnham or half a hundred other BallyBogMans, two farmers fall to reviewing their experiences of the big city. One has walked the streets and avenues and come away with memories of glistening steeples and dreaming spires, monuments to men of bearing and import, Palladian porticos and grand civic cupolas, pillars, piers, and palisades, and the air full of singing birds. The other has walked the same streets, yet his memories are of grey brick tenements shouldering against each other like nervous thugs; cracked fanlights, windows boarded over with card, baby carriages full of coal or potatoes, tramps in doorways, cabbage leaves underfoot, the perfume of urine and porter, pressing people with voices like flatirons. They might have visited cities continents apart, but it is the same city.
— Ian McDonald, King of Morning, Queen of Day
Explore the world with an open mind, a sturdy carry-on, and clothes that don't wrinkle!
— Madeleine K. Albright, Notes From My Travels
Travel with the wit of an adult, and the wonder of a child.
— Anonymous
What I like best about traveling is exploring new places, cultures, and cuisines, and learning to look at the world through a different lens. Travel really is the world’s best teacher. And actually, veganism offers the same thing. Becoming vegan completely changed my worldview and enabled me to connect with nature and with my fellow earthlings in a way I never had before. By combining travel with veganism, I’m able to view the world through a whole new window and experience places in a way that most other tourists don’t.
— Wendy Werneth
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).
— Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
Sri Lanka is a beautiful little island nation parked perilously close to India; a little too hot, a little too humid, and perhaps too expensive, but to its credit are fantastic beaches, strangely melancholy hills, and the ruins of kingdoms past.
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste
My love for languages and my love for travel really go hand in hand and feed off of each other. There’s no better way to learn a language than by immersing yourself in a culture where it’s spoken, and there’s no better way to immerse yourself in a culture than by learning to speak the local language.
— Wendy Werneth
Travel always excited her--the strong and unfamiliar smells, the movement, the anxiety of arrival and departure times, she shouting of conductors, the idea of her tired old self changed by ever new surroundings.
— Anna Godbersen, Envy
Go somewhere you know nothing about and see what happens.
— Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5
The story of life depends on how well you live your life.
— Hockson Floin
We who are residing in a foreign country, away from the immediate scene of action, perhaps can feel more deeply than those at home the evil effects of the present distracted condition of our country.
— David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris
You have to pay attention to the road even if you don't know where you're going.
— Marty Rubin
I need complicated railroad journeys and people speaking to me in foreign languages to keep me happy. I want to see the world and write stories about everything I see.
— Elizabeth Wein, The Pearl Thief
...being a weatherman in Ireland is about the biggest scam going.
— Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure
A good traveler is one who who does not know where he is going to , and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
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.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Those who say traveling is expensive, are just ill-informed.
— Maria Angelova
Nothing brings home closer than going home...
— Will Advise
The world is full of places I haven't been.
— Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied
But in my clutching, it began to slip away. I softened my grasp and the sense of fluidity returned, I rode it like a wave. ...This paradox provoked in me a sense of freedom and relief-relief that what I was always aware of on a faint, subconscious level was a strong and satisfying truth.
— Andrew McCarthy, The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down
Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It's a contention of Heat Moon's - believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he's going to get - that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.
— William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
On Sundays, Presbyterians were not allowed to eat hot food or read the funny papers or travel the shortest journey; parents believed in Hell and believed tiny babies could go there. Baptists were not supposed to know, up until their dying day, how to play cards or dance. And so on.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
I think about what the man at the Coney joint said. He was right. We are the people who stay. We stay in our homes and pay them off. We stay at our jobs. We do our thirty and come home to stay even more. We stay until we are no longer able to mow our lawns and our gutters sag with saplings, until our houses look haunted to the neighborhood children. We like it where we are. I guess then the other question is: Why do we even travel? There can only be one answer to that: we travel to appreciate home. (p.97)
— Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker
Somewhere along the line, the crazy youth hostelers I kept seeing everywhere stopped looking so crazy.
— Jen Malone, Wanderlost
Oh don't be pompous and gloomy,darling," chided Amalfi. "There are thousands of places just as lovely as this. And as peaceful.""That's where you are wrong," said Tyson,leaning his elbows on the warm stone. "I've seen a lot of the world, A hell of a lot of it!But there's something special about this island Something that I haven't met anywhere else Do you know what is the most familiar sound in Zanzibar?-laughter! Walk through the streets of the little city almost any time of day or night, and you'll hear it. People laughing. There is a gaiety and good humour about them that is strangely warming to even such a corrugated, corroded and eroded heart as mine and this is the only place that I have hit upon where black and white and every shade in between 'em appear to able to live in complete friendliness and harmony, with no colour bar. It's living proof and a practical demonstration that it can be done.
— M.M. Kaye, Death in Zanzibar
As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water.
— Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines
Traveling, she realized, was like a slow dismemberment of the body. It plucked the heart out of her and split it into pieces, leaving a bit behind wherever she went, never to be whole again.
— Rhian J. Martin, A Different Familiar
When we told our guide that we didn't want to go to all the tourist places he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don't want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists.
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Kodaikanal holiday makers favorite pick among hotels, resorts, cottages, homestay in kodaikanal and boutique hotel. Just five minutes walking distance to the Kodaikanal lake, Bryant park, nearby forest, hiking trails, view points, Kodaikanal Club, Kodaikanal international school, shopping area bus stand, and restaurants like Dominos, Subway, Cafe coffee day and many more,you can book your rooms at some of the best place at kodaikanal.
— villaretreat
The handkerchief is the universal utensil of the seasoned traveler. It can be a sanitizing device, a seat cover, a dust mask, a garrote, a bandage, a gag, or a white flag. One may feel well-prepared with nothing but a pocket square.
— Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends
Life is short and the older you get, the more you feel it. Indeed, you begin to realize how short life is. Almost everyone has at least one friend who left the planet too soon. People lose their capacity to walk, run, think, and experience life. I realize how important it is to use the time I have to see as much of the world as I can.
— Nicholas Kontis
To feel is to go to the places you were.
— Will Advise
As we sat in the sun, drinking tea made from maple leaves (seasoned with apple and apricot), as we meandered through the 19th Century European park that leads toward the tiny lane on which our favourite tatami tea house is hidden – Don had come here ten months earlier after his Japanese father in law died - I thought how distinctive Don’s relaxed and responsive spirit can be. I’d walked these same streets with other friends for twenty seven years now, many of them celebrated travelers; they’d fired questions at me, shot out theories, spun this notion about Japan and that judgment.Don, by comparison, hung back. He seemed eager to take in as much as he possibly could. He didn’t have agenda or preoccupation, and in that regard appeared to rejoice in the rare traveler’s gift of allowing the day and the place to take him where they wanted him to go.
— Don George, The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George
The horses have stoppedtheir clippity-clop,but feet are too slowfor where I must go.So here I shall stayuntil light of daywhen clippity-clopgets my team underway.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort....My only boast in travel is my effort...
— Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
No matter what we have heard or read about a country, it is our own feeling that counts.
— Dulce Rodrigues, Travelogue - Egypt through the Eyes of a Western Woman
hidden in this huge city beats in unison the heart of a whole people seeking to find their route to a better future.
— Dulce Rodrigues, Travelogue - Egypt through the Eyes of a Western Woman
Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us.
— Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time
Everything is just how I imagined it, yet everything is new
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
From the day I began traveling, I understood that truths were lies and lies were truths.
— Kevin Keenoo
There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man