Quotes About Experience

Claudia Muzzi, of Italian ancestry, had traveled in Italy and indeed spoke Italian. But her most memorable experiences had been in the United States, specifically in Georgia. She planned to write about it later in the week.

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.

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.

found myself confiding that I had been bored in church and in school and listening to speeches (escuchando discursos).

Any advice for me? I'm driving south." "Don't drive at night. You'll be fine. You'll learn a lot. And Mexico City is a lot safer than it used to be.

I argued myself into thinking that physical experience is the only reality. I didn't want to be told about this at second hand. I didn't want to look at picture or study it on a small computer screen. I didn't want to be lectured about it. I wanted to be traveling in the middle of it, and for it to be washing over me, as it was today.

I asked them to amplify a bit.

Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you're reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to endure the unrewarding nuisance and delay of the road. But reading can also be a powerful stimulus to travel.

But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.

Mexicans spend very little time railing against the US government, because in their experience, government by its very nature is corrupt, often criminal, and the poor are its victims.

drove up the road and into the foothills to Huayapam, a simple drive, my car bouncing on the speed bumps, the topes and corrugations.

If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life—the homebound writer's irritants. Being kept waiting is the human condition.

My ideal traveler is the person who goes the old, laborious way into the unknown, and it is this belief that lies behind my travel, and drives me.

Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned—volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So—writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life

Adventure is the unexpected experience of discovery, of course; but it is also a kind of death, an end of innocence.

All journeys were return journeys

Once inside, Dennis almost keeled over from the smell of cooked cabbage. Why was it that any girl he took out had a house with an incredible smell?

I am very old, very cynical of the world, and I know it all. In short, I am seventeen years old, parking off a dark lane with a married man on an early summer night.

Paper Matches My aunts washed dishes while the uncles squirted each other on the lawn with garden hoses. Why are we in here, I said, and they are out there? That's the way it is, said Aunt Hetty, the shriveled-up one. I have the rages that small animals have, being small, being animal. Written on me was a message, "At Your Service," like a book of paper matches. One by one we were taken out and struck. We come bearing supper, our heads on fire.

but now the news of the world aged him more than time itself.

It would stay with him always as everything you ever did stayed with you, every horse you ever saddled, every morning he awoke with Maria Luisa beside him, and every slap of the paten on fresh paper, every time he had thrown open the shutters in the Betancort house, and his captain dying under his hands, always there like a tangle of telegraph wires in the brain where no dispatch was ever lost, what an odd thing, an odd thing.

All four of them had taken her, and she had not been able to distinguish him from the others. They