Quotes About Journey

Africa had been deliverance for me, a liberating embrace and an opportunity.

How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there

What I saw, what I experienced, the freedom of the trip, the people I met, the things I learned: my days were filled with road candy.

The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace

His book accurately reflects what I feel in traveling in America—the solitary road trip that is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on earth.

Tourists don't know where they've been and Travelers don't know where they are going.

I decided to go because I had a free year.

I had my own compartment - plenty of space, plenty of provisions, the grapes, cookies, chocolates and tea that made being on the Trans-Siberian like a luxurious form of convalescence.

Tourists don't know where they've been. Travellers don't know where they're going.

and in a lifetime of travel had never felt more fully alive

This is a triumphant mood for a long trip, just slipping out and not telling anyone, and fairly sure that no one will notice I've gone.

Friends, we're on the same road.

But no sooner had I gotten behind the wheel than a feeling came over me that was like being caressed by a cosmic wind, reminding me of what travel at its best can do: I was set free.

I think shows how nebulous some migrants regard this desire for transformation.

A train journey is travel; everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands.—GRB

I turned seventy in the Kalahari Desert and defended myself against oafs in the stink and misery of northern Angola. All these trips, ten of them, became books.

We walk through ourselves," Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, summing up the travel experience, "meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

The glare of gas station rest stops, mystical, comet-like as they rushed past, but melancholy and ordinary when we paused for the ten-minute breaks.

just ten steps from one country to the other, a door in the wall

Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest.

If a train is large and comfortable you don't even need a destination; a corner seat is enough, and you can be one of those travelers who stay in motion, straddling the tracks, and never arrive or feel they ought to.

Penrhyndeudraeth

I was happier than I had been since starting this trop on The Iron Rooster. I was driving. I was in charge. I was taking my time; and Tibet was empty. The weather was dramatic-snow on the hills, a high wind, and black clouds piled up on the mountains ahead. I also thought: I didn't die the other day.

But curious to see the fence, I drove to the Rio Grande Valley, south to Harlingen, over to McAllen, and down Twenty-Third Street to International Boulevard and the frontier at Hidalgo, where the thing was obvious, ugly, and unambiguous.