Quotes from Bruce Chatwin

And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.

Music… is a memory bank for finding one's way about the world.

I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.

I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.

Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.

For life is a journey through a wilderness

As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.

Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.

'I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China, and continue my profession.' 'As sanitary engineer?' 'No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries of the world.'

But the concepts of 'good' or 'beautiful', so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. The first speakers of language took the raw material of their surroundings and pressed it into metaphor to suggest abstract ideas. The

I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.

Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder.

I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul. Baudelaire, 'Any Where Out of this World!

I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

His legs withered. His stomach stretched taut as a drum. His skin erupted in watery pustules: whichever way he turned was agony. Phosphorescent centipedes crawled over him at night; and the vultures spattered him with ammoniac droppings, shuffling for position along the wall, and flexing their pinions with the noise of tearing silk.

Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer. Martin Heidegger, 'Language

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it … but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill … Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right. Søren Kierkegaard, letter to Jette (1847)

He went back to his solitary wanderings. Believing any set of four walls to be a tomb or a trap, he preferred to float over the most barren of open spaces.

Music', said Arkady, 'is a memory bank for finding one's way about the world.

Quali sono, quindi le prime impressioni che un bimbo nomade ha del mondo? Un capezzolo dondolante e una cascata d'oro.

Al termine di una notte di luna un cane ulula e poi ammutolisce. La luce del fuoco tremola e la sentinella sbadiglia. Un uomo vecchissimo passa silenzioso davanti alle tende, e saggia il terreno con un bastone per accertarsi di non inciampare nelle corde tese. Poi prosegue. La sua gente si trasferisce in una regione più verde. Mosè si reca all'appuntamento con gli sciacalli e gli avvoltoi.

Un marabutto smise di pregare per interrogarmi. "Esiste un popolo chiamato mericani?" chiese. "Sì". "Dicono che hanno visitato la luna". "E' vero". "Sono blasfemi".

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