Quotes About Wanderlust

wanted to be like an orphan who had bummed around the country on trains and just arrived out of nowhere

I didn't want anyone to know I had parents. I wanted to be like an orphan who had bummed around the country on trains and just arrived out of nowhere, with no roots, no connections, no background.

Summers there are awful! Winters there are awful! Why do you stay? You ought to run away! Hop a train! Stow away on a bus! What am I saying? You could just buy yourself a ticket. It would be interesting to talk to you if you did it the other way, though. We could compare scars and bruises. It might be fun.

There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.

his little whirl-about of a head was so full of the notion of going out to see the world, that it forgot her in five minutes: however, though his head forgot her, I am glad to say his heart did not.

Reading is like a journey to a new place

A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.

But wanderlust is like a pretty girl - you wake up one morning, find she's grown old and decide that either you're going to commit your life or you're going to walk away.

I grew up in South Africa and I would look at maps and we were at the bottom of the world. There was this whole thing up there. I was always reading encyclopedias about the world. So travel was something I was always attracted to.

Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely…and half the time you'll be wondering why the hell you're in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires. But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.

had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me.

wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

I was bypassing the High Sierra—missing Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Tuolumne Meadows and the John Muir and Desolation wildernesses

Oregon. Oregon. Oregon.

all the women who wanted to be hobos were holed up in some house with a gaggle of children to raise. Children who'd been fathered by hobo men who'd hit the road.

Each of Dermoût's sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.

I want to see a bit more of New York, even though it's snowing and cold.

The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking... The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

The sea is at its best at London, near midnight, when you are within the arms of a capacious chair, before a glowing fire, selecting phases of the voyages you will never make.

There comes a moment in all travel when you know that you have really started. It may be weeks before you start or weeks after you have started; it is a spiritual emotion, a turning towards the future with an eager heart...