Quotes from Bruce Chatwin

One year, he went to Paris for the week-end: but that completely upset his equilibrium.

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

in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory 'drive' or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this 'drive' was inseparable from his central nervous system; and that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This

O dromedário tem o olho do cu mais elegante de todos os animais que conheço, nada tem que ver com a carne rosada e berrante do recto que se vê num cavalo. E produz a mais delicada bosta - uma forma elíptica, muito perfeita, que depressa endurece ao sol. a forma e a textura de uma noz-pecã.

In my grandmother's dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin.

To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

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

Because they knew each other's thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking.

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.

Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

The real home of man is not his house but the road. Life itself is a travel that has to be done by foot.

A journey is a fragment of Hell.

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 in the world.

Anything was better than to be loved for one's things.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

Sometimes, I overheard my aunts discussing these blighted destinies; and Aunt Ruth would hug me, as if to forestall my following in their footsteps. Yet, from the way she lingered over such words as 'Xanadu' or 'Samarkand' or the 'wine-dark sea,' I think she also felt the trouble of the 'wanderer in her soul.

Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: the drinker drinks; the devout prays; the lonely grows lonelier, sometimes fatally.

What am I doing here? Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia

The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?