Quotes from Sara Wheeler

I believed that what mattered to God was the direction I was facing not how far away I was. Sin it seemed to me was the refusal to let God be God.

Don't you sometimes find daily life almost unbearably poetic? Minute curiosity is a requirement of the travel writer – as it is of the biographer, novelist and poet. The significance of the trivial is what makes a piece of travel writing human, not the stuntish business of being the first person to paddle the Congo. Out there on the road, I have often found that the most aimless and boring interludes yield, in the long run, the most fertile material.

I do think music teaches us the thing we most want to know: that we are not alone. On the other hand–remember I have reserved the right to be inconsistent–surely the only truth is that we are, in the end, alone.

The fact is,' she stated bluntly, 'I am no more a human being than a gust of wind is. I have never had a human individual life. I have … lived in the joys, sorrows and worries of other people … it is the non-human world I belong to myself. My people are mangroves, swamps, rivers and the sea and so on–we understand each other.

Turgenev complained in a letter that Spring in Europe lacked the explosiveness of that season in Russia.

Tolstoy was obsessed with truth, but only told it in his novels. Dostoyevsky, obsessed not with truth but with God, was a compulsive gambler. He pawned his watch so many times that his saintly second wife said she never knew what time it was.

Their lives were and are consumed with the generally dreadful business of being Russian.

Forbidden zones were familiar to the point of institutionalisation in the Soviet System, but more than forty 'sensitive' cities remain shut off.

Russian's claim the banya as their first doctor, vodka being the second and raw garlic the third.

According to a much quoted Russian saying 'the country has two eternal problems, roads and idiots'.

There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian people, and without it their happiness is incomplete - Dostoyevsky

The sun never sets there [Siberia] - one end wakes up when the other is going to sleep. In parts it is so cold that living trees explode with a sound like gunfire...

The quickest way from St Petersburg to Kamchatka in furthest Siberia is still often westwards via New York.

it was] perceived that it was easier to rise upwards east of the Urals. A man who left Russia as a common soldier became a sergeant in Tobolsk, a captain in Yakutsk and a colonel in Kamchatka.

Their [500 Siberian Tribes] presence predated Russians by thousands of years. Yet they are routinely referred to as 'half-thawed humanity' and 'descendants of fish'...

You can only appreciate the engineering feat of the Trans-Siberian railway by travelling along it in winter. They might as well have laid tracks across Antarctica.

We stopped for the driver, Sergei, to take a bathroom break in the woods. He had taken a dislike to me. 'What would you have done', he asked, 'if it were minus thirty, which it might well have been, and you were wearing those light trousers?' I said that the fabric was high-tech and I had worn the trousers in the Arctic, and showed him my merino leggings underneath, and two pairs of thermal socks. at this news he changed tack. 'Far too much for this mild weather'.

A resident [of Chukotka] had stuck a flyer on a telegraph pole advertising his flat in exchange for a one-way ticket to Moscow. Unemployment runs at seventy per cent in the surrounding villages.

The Soviet period was a disaster, not least because supply lines were so long and so corrupt that little was left by the time goods reached the Russian Far East except things nobody wanted, such as the fabled ten thousand left-foot gumboots. (On that occasion, transport planning failed to the extent that the 10,000 left boots went in the opposite direction to the same number of right boots, heading nobody knew where).