Quotes from Dervla Murphy

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India.

Sunnis consider Shias a pack of unwholesome fanatics and Shias consider Sunnis a gang of lukewarm no-goods - there's nothing like religion for spreading brotherly love!

Each human spirit is immortalfor time cannot destroy

Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner.

Is this something else our age does - on the one hand make communication easier than ever before, while on the other hand widening the gulf between those who are 'developed' and those who are not?

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts, and a few days later I decided to cycle to India...However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.

For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.

The more I see of unmechanized places and people the more conviced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between Man and Nature.

There has been a sustained and dreadfully successful campaign to make most people dissatisfied with what I would call the normal life and some would call the simple life.

If I Am murdered en route it will have been well worth while!

Even a brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to help understand what we are

Life would be just a neutral wasteland if one always ran away from the joys of love merely because one knew that pain and grief might be involved too.

To me, city-dwellers are The Dispossessed, unfortunates who have been deprived of every creature's right to territory. There is a sense in which country folk, however impoverished, own their birthplace and all the land around it that can be covered in a long day's tramp – the natural, immemorial limit to the territory of a human being.

Certainly nobody in the large grubby restaurant 'wanted to know'. My two fellow-diners were truck drivers being eyed hopefully by five adolescent girls in tawdry attire, clustered around the courtyard doorway. 'Two into five doesn't go,' I reflected. But perhaps these two would go into five if their charges were low enough.

The Protestants seem to come here because they hate Islam and the Catholics because they love God.

Keeping one's patience is really a question of remembering one's place in the universe.

the fact that she completely obscured his view of the road was quite irrelevant since Asian drivers never look where they're going.

I never can understand why most people imagine a bed – some sort of bed: any sort of bed – to be a prerequisite of sleep.

American bible-belt extraction – contempt for 'evil African superstitions' also persists. Yet I, as an agnostic, can see no qualitative difference between believing in witchcraft and the power of the ancestors and believing in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, never mind transubstantiation and papal infallibility.

The hardships and poverty of my youth had been a good apprenticeship for this form of travel. I had been brought up to understand that material possessions and physical comfort should never be confused with success, achievement and security. And soon I was discovering for myself that our real material needs are very few and that the extras now presented as 'needs' not only endanger true contentment but diminish our human dignity.

Men and women who live all their lives in centrally heated homes and offices, and go in the car to post a letter and collect the children from school, and have labour-saving devices for every conceivable purpose (including electric tooth-brushes and carving-knives)—such people have become so sensually unaware and so unresponsive to physical challenges that they are only half-alive.

I thank God for my sanguine temperament, which refuses to allow me to believe in disaster until it is finally manifest

Kabul reminds me of Sofia in that the traffic is virtually nil by capital city standards;

The Irish have a flair for wringing from death the last drop of emotion and they do not quite understand those who react otherwise.