Quotes from Bruce Chatwin

Io commentai scherzosamente che la passione per i giganti è, in genere, un sintomo di declino: un'epoca che scambia l'Ercole Farnese per un ideale era destinata a finire male.

He panned the streams for gold. Some winters he stayed with John Evans at Trevelin and swapped dirty nuggets for flour. He was a crack shot. He shot trout from the rivers; a cigarette packet from the police commissioner's mouth; and had the habit of picking off ladies' high-heels.

The plesiosaurus also lent its name to a tango and a brand of cigarettes.

THE TENANT of the Estancia Paso Roballos was a Canary Islander from Tenerife. He sat in a pink-washed kitchen, where a black clock hammered out the hours and his wife indifferently spooned rhubarb jam into her mouth.

Behind him were three Arctic voyages in search of the North-West Passage. Before him were two books of seamanship and six fatal cuts of a Japanese pirate's sword.

He drew a map on a paper napkin. 'You'll see the house in some trees by a lake,' he said and wished me luck.

From the ship they saw a giant dancing naked on the shore, 'dancing and leaping and singing, and, while singing, throwing sand and dust on his head'. As the white men approached, he raised one finger to the sky, questioning whether they had come from heaven.

The lives of the older Da Silvas were empty and sad. They mourned the Slave Trade as a lost Golden Age when their family was rich, famous and white. They were worn down by rheumatism and the burdens of polygamy.

Immediately after his ordination, Dowd startled his parents and the Fathers by riding past on his new racehorse, a brace of six-shooters strapped over his cassock. That night, in Sausalito, he had the pleasure—a pleasure he had long savoured—of giving last rites to the first man he shot.

His one friend was the black boy, Pepeu, whom he held in thrall. Together they plucked finches alive, made certain experiments with the flesh of a watermelon, and shouted obscenities at the girls washing tripes in the river.    Once, they tried crucifying a cat, but it got away.

Often, the King would dance himself, rolling his scapulars and weaving his steps around the skulls of his favourite victims. Or he would amuse himself by teaching little boys to chop heads, and when they made a mess of it shout, 'Not that way, you fool! Think of chopping wood!' 

At dinner the waiter wore white gloves and served a lump of burnt lamb that bounced on the plate. Spread over the restaurant wall was an immense canvas of gauchos herding cattle into an orange sunset. An old-fashioned blonde gave up on the lamb and sat painting her nails. An Indian came in drunk and drank through three jugs of wine. His eyes were glittering slits in the red leather shield of his face. The jugs were of green plastic in the shape of penguins.

The train started with two whistles and a jerk. Ostriches bounded off the track as we passed, their feathers billowing like smoke. The mountains were grey, flickering in the heat haze. Sometimes a truck smeared a dust-cloud along the horizon.

They were close friends. He was full of vitality, but it was a borrowed vitality, for the Welshmen cheered up all who saw their bright and weatherbeaten faces.

stopped raining and I came to leave. Bees hummed around the poet's hives. His apricots were ripening the colour of a pale sun. Clouds of thistledown drifted across the view and in a field there were some fleecy white sheep.

But when the men went ashore for firewood, the wind veered and breakers began rolling into the bay. Captain and crew had to strip and shove the boat out to sea : 'Oh! It was cold. And the sight of all hands naked was enough to make a cat laugh. We were red as lobsters and our teeth chattering.

Tierra del Fuego - The Land of Fire. The fires were the camp-fires of the Fuegian Indians. In one version Magellan saw smoke only and called it Tierra del Humo, the Land of Smoke, but Charles V said there was no smoke without fire and changed the name.

Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate.

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 take at random from the R's - told a story of exile, disillusion and anxiety behind lace curtains.

Coleridge once jotted in a notebook, 'The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman.' What is so beguiling about a specialist predator is the idea of an intimacy with the Beast! For if, originally, there was one particular Beast, would we not want to fascinate him as he fascinated us? Would we not want to charm him, as the angels charmed the lions in Daniel's cell?

there had lived on the western frontier of China a people called the Yueh-chih, who had reddish hair and blue eyes and who spoke an Indo-European language similar, at several removes, to Gaelic. The Huns had horribly defeated the

Our fatal flaw, or Fall, he insisted, was to have developed 'artificial weapons' instead of natural ones. As a species, we thus lacked the instinctive inhibitions which prevented the 'professional carnivores' from murdering their fellows.

Underneath was a votive shrine with; offerings—a tin of Nestlé's milk, a plaster model of a girl in bed, a nail dipped in grey paint, and some burned-out candles.

He lifts his eyes to Jade Dragon Peak and, suddenly, in his silver greatcoat, becomes the living image of my favourite upland traveller, the poet Li Po: You ask me why I live in the grey hills. I smile but do not answer, for my thoughts are elsewhere. Like peach petals carried by the stream, they have gone