Quotes About Experience

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.

Travel had to do with movement and truth, with trying everything, offering yourself to experience and then reporting it.

If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear and sometimes - importantly - to suffer the effects of this curiosity.

Nothing fully prepares you for the strangeness of the border experience.

Paul Theroux

the journey is the goal.

every trip is unique.

from San Luis Potosí, and at Santa María del Río, where the good road ended

One encounter in particular stayed in my memory

I found my berth and discovered that no one else was going to Xian. The sleeper was empty. This was the rarest situation on a Chinese train, and one to be relished. Such circumstances were almost luxurious and definitely cozy.

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

I had slipped into Mexico in a matter of minutes; returning, it took more than two hours in a line of uncomplaining Mexicans

It was the simplest crossing I'd ever made in a long career of crossing borders

The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic, maintaining the delusion that it is travel. This is the equivalent of being measured like a projectile and being shot out of a cannon, and that's how most of us feel in such a state, like a human cannonball, dazed and confused, in the company of other cannonballs.

Paul Theroux

I was now deeper into Mexico than I had driven so far.

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

he was turning sixty-two, not an age of life-altering shocks but only of subtle diminishments.

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.

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.

An airport is an obstacle course, and because of that it can sour you on the whole notion of travel. By degrees, over the years, the airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control. Such is the clumsy questioning of motives

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

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