Quotes About Travel

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars... Anything is possible on a train...

I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, I went there---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- and it wasn't like that. I say, Because I am not you.

Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people's.

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone 'on safari' is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.

We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.

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

Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial.

Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of writing - groping around in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness.

MOST TRAVEL, AND CERTAINLY the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life. This risky suspension of disbelief is often an experience freighted with anxiety. But what's the alternative? Usually there is none.

You travel all over, the woman said. Do you write about your travels? I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books, she said. I said, Exactly, and told her why.

Nothing is more satisfying in travel than to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a teacher.

Texas A&M International

Emphasizing the honky-tonk and the wickedness, I sounded disapproving, but I was happy. This was life to me, and I was joyous on those seedy streets, pretty women in doorways snatching at me. I was a thrill-seeking traveler, looking for something sensational to write about, but I did not look very deeply.

Nothing moves in India without a bribe, and bribes had been demanded of me in China, Africa, Brazil, Pakistan, and Turkey. As I was seated in a cubicle in the immigration office of Ngurah Rai Airport in Denpasar, Bali, a frowning man in a uniform loomed over me and said, "Give me what I want or I put you on the next plane to Kuala Lumpur." (I gave him $120.) I'd had my wits about me in those places.

I walked for an hour and then returned by a different route to wait out the weekend. It was one of those empty interludes in travel, an airless unrewarding delay, when nothing occurs except a rising sense of loneliness and uncertainty, a darkening of prospects, the condition of being an outsider with all of a stranger's suspicions.

I had done enough traveling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance

But I was not looking for repose or tranquility. This weekend was an aberration. It is pleasant in Mexico to sit by the beach, inert and sunlit, sipping a mojito, but who wants to hear about that? What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm.

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.

If he doesn't talk to me, and he doesn't walk around with me, and he doesn't travel in the same compartment,' I said, 'I don't understand why he wants to come with me.' 'To make sure you are comfortable. Hospitality. You are our guest ...