c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Toilet paper was either bleached white or unbleached gray, yet there were more than a dozen kinds of ketchup and about 30 brands of cookies. I approved of their priorities.
— Kristine K. Stevens, If Your Dream Doesn't Scare You, It Isn't Big Enough: A Solo Journey Around the World
There I was, poised on the edge of the high diving board of life, and the pool kept moving around.
— Kristine K. Stevens, If Your Dream Doesn't Scare You, It Isn't Big Enough: A Solo Journey Around the World
And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.
— Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas
We've grown accustomed to living smaller and more simply.
— Nancy Petralia, Not in a Tuscan Villa: During a Year in Italy, a New Jersey Couple Discovers the True Dolce Vita When They Trade Rose-colored Glasses for 3Ds
You must go on adventures to find out where you belong.
— Sue Fitzmaurice
Once upon a time there was an empress, trapped as a ghost in the ruins of a jewelled palace, cursed to find another soul to take her place. At least, that's what the empress heard. But, as it turned out, stories can have any ending you like.
— Kirsty Logan, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales
Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight....what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughters, who wanted to be a writer. [I said], "Tell your daughter three things." Tell her to read...Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. ...Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means. Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these are three I trust. -- from "A Voice
— Barry López, About This Life
It is a place that 'grows upon you' every day. There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.
— Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy
No day should be without romance
— Dana Bennett, The Demarcation of Jack
I want my heart to be the thin place. I don't want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my fragile, hurting heart, to recognize fleeting kairos, eternal moments as they pass. I want to be my own mountain and my own retreat.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
Explore often. Only when you will know how small you are and how big the world is.
— Pradeepa Pandiyan
The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.
— Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927
I tell ya! The road to success is an endless battle for you and me.
— Steven Jackson, Numbers... a Gangsta's Child: A Woman's Journey from Rags to Riches
I imagine the people whose lives are most intertwined with mine, and I realize life has gone on without me. The planet has not imploded because I, the girl who has always done what is expected of her, decided not to, just this once.
— Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure
Often I would hear other people ask, “When will I be normal again?”What you don’t often hear is a blunt truth: things will never be normal again. Not the “old" normal at least. You have to invent the new normal.I knew that I needed to take an honest appraisal of my life. Were my problems really bigger than me? Of course not. That’s why I remained in constant motion. Resistance to life’s changes meant death. No matter how depressing and bleak my past looked, I knew that I needed to keep moving and adapting in order to survive.
— Michelle Dallocchio
My need to parent is so much bigger, sometimes, than my children’s need for parenting.
— Margot  Page, Paradise Imperfect: An American Family Moves to the Costa Rican Mountains
A wise walker will set out early, keeping an open mind on how far to travel, allowing each day's adventure to evolve.
— John Litwinovich, Assis Walking Adventure Guide
One of the great joys of traveling through Italy is discovering firsthand that it is, indeed, a dream destination.
— Debra Levinson, Italy Luxury: Family Hotels & Resorts
Yes,it is remarkable how far a person can travel by sea.
— S.L. Whyte, Stelladaur: Finding Tir Na Nog
Colombians might live in one of best places in the world to grow coffee beans, yet their cups of coffee come from dehydrated granules in tiny plastic packages. This is the definition of tragedy.
— Bryanna Plog, Misspelled Paradise: A Year in a Reinvented Colombia
As to rocket ships flying between America and Europe, I believe it is worth seriously trying for. Thirty years ago persons who were developing flying were laughed at as mad, and that scorn hindered aviation. Now we heap similar ridicule upon stratoplane or rocket ships for trans-Atlantic flights. (1933)[Predicting high-altitude jet aircraft for routine long-distance travel.]
— Auguste Piccard
Mexico, as it was in the 1970s—and isn’t now—was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see.
— Mason West, Counting Stars at Forty Below
These Aussie girls are free to set their own courses in the world, to meander and experiment. Their travels are not bumps along the road - they are life itself. See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it, not the other way around, as seems the general trajectory in the U.S.
— Rachel Friedman, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure
No, there's going to be no even tenor with me. The more uneven it is the happier I shall be. And when my time comes to die, I'll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain, thrills — every emotion that any human ever had — and I'll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed.” ― Richard Halliburton
— Richard Halliburton, Richard Halliburton: His Story of His Life's Adventure
For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.
— Sara Sheridan
We have trains to hop, voyages to embark on, and rides to hitch. And then there’s the great American wild—vanishing but still there—ready to impart its wisdom from an Alaskan peak or a patch of grass growing in a crack of a city sidewalk. And no matter how much sprawl and civilization overtake our wilds, we’ll always have the boundless wildlands in ourselves to explore.
— Ken Ilgunas
I don't know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.
— Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
When you're (traveling) with someone else, you share each discovery, but when you are alone, you have to carry each experience with you like a secret, something you have to write on your heart, because there's no other way to preserve it.
— Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life
We can change in one day. We can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in one day.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Day
The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.
— Giacomo Casanova
The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package," Roosevelt sneered.
— Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers.
— Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons
We all travelled light, taking with us only what we considered to be the bare essentials of life. When we opened our luggage for Customs inspection, the contents of our bags were a fair indication of character and interests. Thus Margo’s luggage contained a multitude of diaphanous garments, three books on slimming, and a regiment of small bottles each containing some elixir guaranteed to cure acne. Leslie’s case held a couple of roll-top pullovers and a pair of trousers which were wrapped round two revolvers, an air-pistol, a book called Be Your Own Gunsmith, and a large bottle of oil that leaked. Larry was accompanied by two trunks of books and a brief-case containing his clothes. Mother’s luggage was sensibly divided between clothes and various volumes on cooking and gardening. I travelled with only those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam-jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids. Thus, by our standards fully equipped, we left the clammy shores of England.
— Gerald Durrell
You can go everywhere, but in the end you run back into yourself.
— Constance A. Dunn
The boy could see in his father's gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world—a desire that was still alive, despite his father's having had to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink, food to eat, and the same place to sleep every night of his life.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Heavy burdens fell away so easily when one is traveling.
— Barbara Hodgson, The Tattooed Map
Let's go together and go to different places and see different things. It'll be fun!- Gon Freaks
— Togashi, Yoshihiro
Looking back I can see that there have been no breaks from one departure to the next
—  I start planning again before we've even arrived back home.
I’m fine. I’m at an antique store, by the clothes store just a mile or so from-”	“Which clothes store, Tess? If you haven’t noticed, there are about a million.
— Embee, Tess Embers
Aren’t there different electrical outlets here? And what about money? And isn’t it-”	“Relax, Tess,” Taylor told me. “I have everything covered.
— Embee, Tess Embers
There are million countries which we will visit together.
— Christine Minasian
We speed through the streets past modern buildings and ancient architecture. Gazing through the taxi window Rome becomes a wet painting someone has wiped a hand across.
— Kevin James Moore, The Go-Go Girl
My travels inevitably begin with copious research and planning. I began this kind of planning long ago when I was very young and anxious to hit the road. Hours were spent pouring over junior encyclopedias memorizing the names of exotic-sounding cities---Addis, Ababa, Samarkand, Damascus. Lengthy lists were written detailing the most minute necessities: three pairs of socks, two pencils. spare batteries, rope.
— Barbara Hodgson, The Tattooed Map
You wanted to see the world. And yet, all I want is to see you.
— Sade Andria Zabala, Coffee and Cigarettes
I love getting lost on purpose
— Lisa Desrochers, A Little Too Far
Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.
— Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off
— Alex Garland, The Beach
As a traveler, I've often found that the more a culture differs from my own, the more I am struck by its essential humanity.
— Rick Steves, Travel as a Political Act
Leave no path untaken.
— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
You are only given one life, one chance at fully living it...take risks, believe in your dreams, explore the world and her people, live out loud!
— Danell Lynn, Philanthropic Wanderlust
When you traveled with company, the country would shrink away; your companion would become the subject of your voyage as much as the country itself. As for group travel, the country would end up being the silent host whose presence one forgets like one does an overly timid guest, the principal subject becoming the backdrop.
— Édouard Levé, Suicide
Why was I still traveling? Was it purely because it was better than turning around and going home, where I would have to make grown-up choices about my future? Or was I waiting to happen across a place that would tell me to stay?
— Pete Spurrier, Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China
You can travel the world but If you cannot let go of the past, you will never move on.
— Gerald Freeman, Kill Daddy
Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.
— Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism
To the tourist, travel is a means to an end; to the traveler, it's an end in itself.
— Marty Rubin
Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
I find having your own car is like a passport to the world.
— Gloria Whelan, See What I See
When it was time to board my flight, I took one last glance back. I knew that I had everything with me so it was not a "make sure I have everything" glance. It was more like a parting glance to Philadelphia, my home, America- for I would not be coming back for ten months. (Ch 5- Twenty in Paris)
— Andrea Bouchaud, Twenty in Paris: A Young American Perspective of Studying Abroad in Paris
In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society’s rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community’s identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability.
— Édouard Levé, Suicide
Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.
— Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.
— Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
Eleanor was all apologies, but Sarah enjoyed seeing a bit more of the Czech countryside. You probably couldn't say that you had really seen a country if all you had seen was a city or two. You had to see where the food was grown, what the riverbanks looked like, and what the highway manners of the inhabitants were.
— Magnus Flyte, City of Dark Magic
With no other choices open to us, we'd turned our gaze seaward. The oceans were our America: they reached farther than any prairie, untamed as on the first day of creation. Nobody owned them.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
Is China a drug? Like any drug, it depends entirely on the user’s own state of mind. If we’re making metaphors, for old China hands I’d imagine their time here draws parallels with the soaring euphoria and bleak depths of smoking opium, while China for the uninitiated is probably a bit like bath salts: the constantly convulsing nervous system, the paranoia, the god-complex, the rage. I’d liken my own China experience to a decade-long acid trip. It began with liberating my mind from the restraints of Western society. Then I departed on an odyssey that took me tens of thousands of miles across China, experiencing various metaphysical and spiritual states as my journey progressed, punctuated by periods of intense creativity due to my heightened sensory perceptions. To a background score of warped erhu and guzheng, and the looped calls of sidewalk vendors echoing into the void, the kaleidoscopic chaos of this culture surged around me like the Yangtze river – in outer space. Now I’m one with China’s cosmic consciousness. I want to reeducate the communists with love. Or maybe I’m not even here. Maybe I really did perish during my kora around Mount Kailash and none of this ever happened...
— Tom  Carter
I read a lot of travel books before I came here. Fantasised what it would be like. I read Scott’s journal. Those last entries as they froze to death in that tent. ‘Had we lived, I should have made a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’ I got totally caught up in the romance.”“Scott was a self-aggrandising dick.
— Adam Baker, Outpost
I didn't get the impression that the policeman cared much about the whole thing either. After another thirty minutes of ruthless interrogation ('Can you ve'fy you eat banan' pancake?') he let me go asking me not to leave Khao San within 24 hours
— Alex Garland, The Beach
You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.
— Charles Kuralt
The words beat through me like a cosmic string that threatened to dissolve my molecular bonds. The wave fed upon itself until the tsunami it created swept me out of my life and into a world of confinement that broached vastness. That, after all, was the process of space travel. The small spaces, the great speed, the reach beyond knowable.
— William David Hannah, Angels of the Quantum Gate
What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing … Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951
Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself.
— Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
When I'm all grown up, come what may,I'll build a boat to carry me away
— Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana
All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re traveling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.
— Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
When I travel, people say ‘Yet another place in this world’. But I see ‘Another world inside every place I go
— Vivek Thangaswamy
Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.
— Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
I believe the experiences reported in this book are reproducible by anyone who wishes to try. I went to Africa. You can go to Africa. You may have trouble arranging the time or the money, but everybody has trouble arranging something. I believe you can travel anywhere if you want to badly enough.And I believe the same is true of inner travel. You don't have to take my word about chakras or healing energy or auras. You can find about them for yourself if you want to. Don't take my word for it. Be as skeptical as you like.Find out for yourself.
— Michael Crichton, Travels
Travel is the discovery of truth; an affirmation of the promise that human kind is far more beautiful than it is flawed. With each trip comes a new optimism that where there is despair and hardship, there are ideas and people just waiting to be energized, to be empowered, to make a difference for good.
— Dan Thompson, Following Whispers: Walking on the Rooftop of the World in Nepal's Himalayas
The trip doesn’t exist that can set you beyond the reach of cravings, fits of temper, or fears … so long as you carry the sources of your troubles about with you, those troubles will continue to harass and plague you wherever you wander on land or on sea. Does it surprise you that running away doesn’t do you any good? The things you’re running away from are with you all the time.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.
— Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America
So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honorable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting. All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re travelling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
You are what you read.
— Nancy Petralia, Not in a Tuscan Villa: During a Year in Italy, a New Jersey Couple Discovers the True Dolce Vita When They Trade Rose-colored Glasses for 3Ds
Sun and wind and beat of sea,Great lands stretching endlessly...Where be bonds to bind the free?All the world was made for me!
— Adelaide Crapsey
There are more places you haven't heard of then you're heard of!' I loved that
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Seconds later, the female security officer grabbed a pair of my father's shorts from the top of the duffel bag, and emptied out the contents of his pockets. A lighter, three nail files, a pocket wrench, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a nectarine fell onto the folding table. I looked at the woman, looked at my father, and then looked around to see if anyone else was watching.  "What's the problem?" my father asked the woman.  "Sir, I'm going to have to take this lighter away from you," she said.  "The lighter?" I asked her. "What about the bomb kit he's carrying around? He could do a lot more damage to a person with that wrench."  "I need the wrench!" he shrieked.  "For what?"  "What if something goes wrong with the plane?
— Chelsea Handler, Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea
A hotel room all to myself is my idea of a good time.
— Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
My love for peanut butter is so deep that I can't look at a jar without devouring it!
— Monica DiNatale, 365 Guide New York City: Drink. Eat. Save. Every Day of the Year. A Guide to New York City Restaurant Deals and Bar Specials.
Screw the shops
—  I want a duty-free office.
There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own.They are the lordly ones! They come in all colors.They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists.They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor.They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists.They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humor and understanding.When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically.They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean.They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion, or political correctness.They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.It is the nation of nowhere.
— Jan Morris
Remember that a little learning can be a pleasant thing. Italy gives much, in beauty, gaiety, diversity of arts and landscapes, good humor and energy—willingly, without having to be coaxed or courted. Paradoxically, she requires (as do other countries, probably more so) and deserves some preparation as background to enhance her pleasures. It is almost impossible to read a total history of Italy; there was no united country until a hundred years ago, no single line of power, no concerted developments. It is useful, however, to know something about what made Siena run and stop, to become acquainted with the Estes and the Gonzagas, the Medicis and the Borgias, the names that were the local history. It helps to know something about the conflicts of the medieval church with the Holy Roman Empire, of the French, Spanish and early German kings who marked out large chunks of Italy for themselves or were invited to invade by a nervous Italian power. Above all, it helps to turn the pages of a few art and architecture books to become reacquainted with names other those of the luminous giants.The informed visitors will not allow himself to be cowed by the deluge of art. See what interests or attracts you; there is no Italian Secret Service that reports on whether you have seen everything. If you try to see it all except as a possible professional task, you may come to resist it all. Relax, know what you like and don’t like—not the worst of measures—and let the rest go.
— Kate Simon, Italy: The places in between
Sicily is paradise. I live in paradise. Now pass the pasta please.
— Alfred Zappala, The Reverse Immigrant
This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
We checked our bags and got on line with some of our fellow passengers. Judging from the looks of them, it was clear that they were members of a different income bracket from the people I preferred to surround myself with. But since I also wasn't from the income bracket I preferred, I held off on voicing my initial feelings of despair.
— Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
With the earth firmly beneath our feet, we can approach what attracts us, and withdraw from what unnerves us. If there is real danger, we can run. Mobility means security, both physically and emotionally. Flying takes away our most basic way of regulating feelings.
— Capt Tom Bunn LCSW
Every Inch of the Way is a great page turning adventure which is as close as you can get, without actually saddling up and pedalling yourself into the unknown. It takes real magic to turn a great adventure, into a great book. For one thing, most people can't relate to the mindset of the long distance cyclist and I found myself laughing along to Tom's thoughts and observations, wondering if they were in - jokes, shared by those who had seen the world at the speed of a bike, for example his relationship with Serbia's stray dogs! . But his anecdotes have a great balance of the cultures and places, as opposed to just inward reflections, so I am sure would be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in travel and human experience. A lovely story, written from the heart.
— Mark Beaumont
Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere
— Orhan Pamuk, The New Life
Travel is the best teacher. The only way to an open mind is by taking a plane out into the open world.
— C. JoyBell C.
Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
— Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country
Part of the urge to explore is a desire to become lost.
— Tracy Johnston, Shooting the Boh: A Woman's Voyage Down the Wildest River in Borneo
The problem with driving around Iceland is that you’re basically confronted by a new soul-enriching, breath-taking, life-affirming natural sight every five goddamn minutes. It’s totally exhausting.
— Stephen Markley, Tales of Iceland or "Running with the Huldufólk in the Permanent Daylight"
Travel opens your mind as few other things do. It is its own form of hypnotism, and I am forever under its spell.
— Libba Bray, Rebel Angels
Sometimes you need to move away before you can see where you are
— Benny Bellamacina, Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems
That we leave our homes, that we step through our doors to the world, that we travel our whole lives not because we want to collect exotic T-shirts, not because we want to consume foreign adventure the same Western way we consume plastic and Styrofoam and LCD TVs and iPads, but because it has the power to renew us—not the guarantee, not the promise, just the possibility. Because there are places our imaginations can never construct for us, and there are people who we will never meet but we could and we might. It reminds us that there is always reason to begin again.
— Stephen Markley, Tales of Iceland or "Running with the Huldufólk in the Permanent Daylight"
If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'.A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray.Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.
— Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road
We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up into a top travel experience.
— Pete McCarthy, McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery In Ireland
There's always a way if you're not in a hurry.
— Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars... Anything is possible on a train...
— Paul Theroux
Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen.
— Alan Furst, Mission to Paris
What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so difficult for us to allow ourselves a little time to solve the puzzle of our own lives, before it’s too late?
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you?
— Socrates
Born at Letterman Army Hospital. I never actually lived in San Francisco. It's not my home town, but then, I don't have one. I'm a nomad...a gypsy...an Army Brat. Put me on an airplane, send me anywhere. That's where I belong...anywhere.
— Marc Curtis, Growing Up Military: Every Brat Has A Story, Vol. One
I hate traveling with amateurs.
— Rachel Caine, Kiss of Death
Once you have rid yourself of the affliction there, though, every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may be banished to the ends of the earth, and yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be like, a hospitable home. Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Though most tourists accepted the occasional comic misadventure, it was important to them that overall their vacation should be pleasant. When you spend money on a holiday you are essentially purchasing happiness: if you don't enjoy yourself you will feel defrauded.
— Alison Lurie, The Last Resort
The man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.
— Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
A traveller moves among real people in their own milieu and learns from them, soaking up their wisdom and philosophy, their way of being in the world. A tourist simply hops from one tourist highpoint to another, skimming across the surface, cramming in quantity rather than quality, and comes away with his soul and imagination unchanged, untouched by the wonder of a life lived differently.
— Roxanne Reid, A Walk in the Park: Travels in and around South Africa's national parks
And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk, When you get the chance, she said to me, "go.
— Frances Mayes, A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller
I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It's as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.
— Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere. -Komura
— Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known
— Carson McCullers
Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest?'Tis that every mother's sonTravails with a skeleton.Lie down in the bed of dust;Bear the fruit that bear you must;Bring the eternal seed to light,And morn is all the same as night.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
So many birds sitting around, on a dead wire, a bare branch, a cold ground, a drifting seashore; never realizing the glory in their wings and where it can take them, nor the envy as we look on them.
— Anthony Liccione
When the ancient Romans would conquer a new place or a new people, they would leave the language and the customs in tact – they would even let the conquered people rule themselves in most cases, appointing a governor to maintain a foothold in the region.” Wilson leaned against the whiteboard as he spoke, his posture relaxed, his hands clasped loosely.“This was part of what made Rome so successful. They didn't try to make everyone Romans in the process of conquering them. When I went to Africa with the Peace Corp, a woman who worked with the Corp said something to me that I have often thought about since. She told me 'Africa is not going to adapt to you. You are going to have to adapt to Africa.' That is true of wherever you go, whether it's school or whether it's in the broader world.
— Amy Harmon, A Different Blue
I felt as though I owned the whole world. And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny , as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.
— Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask
I ease into the idea of letting go of control and simply let life take the reins. And when I don't hold it so tightly, it doesn't thrash against me so wildly. It calms to a trot and allows me to take in the scenery, experience love, and learn what is important in this world: people, places, memories—not things or perceptions.
— Sarah Reijonen, Country Girl: Letting Love & Wanderlust Take the Reins
While National Geographic magazine had given me a taste of the world, the three-dimensional details of this moment - the tickle of the rain drops, the suck sound of my feet in the mud, the challenge of getting photographs of the monkeys, my immature urge to make the driver wait even longer because he was annoying - would feed me for years to come.
— Kristine K. Stevens, If Your Dream Doesn't Scare You, It Isn't Big Enough: A Solo Journey Around the World
There were only three names on the map of the region we had brought with us, but we now filled in more than two hundred.
— Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet
I don't know anything anymore
— Kim Culbertson, Instructions for a Broken Heart
Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand.
— Chloe Thurlow, Girl Trade
...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...
— Paul Theroux
I always consider every place worth exploring once- just in case there's a thirty foot flaming sign divulging the secret of life, that no one has told me about.
— Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang
But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least.
— Jenny Diski, On Trying to Keep Still
Adventure should be part of everyone's life. It is the whole difference between being fully alive and just existing.
— Holly Morris, Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for Women Who Are Changing the World
I like the idea that when I die, I will have a long sit-down chat withGod and get answers to all my questions. For example, those apple coresthat I threw out of car windows when I was a child—did any of them becometrees? Few boys or men had ever asked me out. I told myself that itwas because I was almost 6-feet tall. Was that true or was there somethinghumbling I needed to know?
— Kristine K. Stevens, If Your Dream Doesn't Scare You, It Isn't Big Enough: A Solo Journey Around the World
If character is destiny, I was fated to be carried off into the desert. From the deck of the ship I had imagined my own ghost and seen my unvanishing footsteps. When you don't belong anywhere it doesn't matter where you are or where you go, if you stay or move on. You arrive at a place where the view forwards and backwards is the same, where the sun rises in the east one day and the west the next, where you stop planning and live like the birds and beasts by intuition and instinct.
— Chloe Thurlow, Girl Trade
Summer is a period of luxurious growth. To be in harmony with the atmosphere of summer, awaken early in the morning and reach to the sun for nourishment to flourish as the gardens do. Work, play, travel, be joyful, and grow into selfless service. The bounty of the outside world enters and enlivens us.
— Paul Pitchford, Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition
It's a pretty good little old place after all, and I have little time for the gloomers who are eternally shrieking that this old mud ball is rolling to the bow wows. I am satisfied to take my chances with this one, thank you, and not worry about the next . . . You must carry along with you a lively imagination and plenty of romance in your soul. Some of the most wonderful things in the world will seem dull and drab unless you view them in the proper light.
— LeRoy Robert Ripley
There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of streams.....when, from the mountain-top, she beheld, far off, across the Sea of Marmara the plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with a white streak or two which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed she might share the majesty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such believers do.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
The past is buried deep within the ground in Rabat, although the ancient walls in the old city are still standing, painted in electrifying variations of royal blue that make the winding roads look like streamlets or shallow ocean water.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom.
— Tahir Shah, Beyond The Devil's Teeth
Foras Road has a sordid reputation (…) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.
— Tahir Shah, Beyond The Devil's Teeth
somewhere along the dust-chocked Guatemalan road between...and ...was where I confirmed that I preferred traveling around the slow, bone-rattling way: by bus,with ordinary people. The bus we were riding in had been repainted in bright reds. The inside was colorful too: the seats had springs popping out of the upholstery, and the floor was caked with dirt and garbage. Chickens, some tied in bunches and others wandering loose, squawked noisily. Bouncing along a road to a place I had never been, and would never go back to, suddenly felt exciting, liberating even
— Chesa Boudin, Gringo
I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.
— Anthony Bourdain
With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.
— Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back
— Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
The fastest way to travel is to be there already.
— Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.
— Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia