Quotes About Travel

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.

I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.

back to my hotel, where it was always mealtime.

sweeper with his handcart was a feature of every border town I visited

That's a road. You can take it. Go that way. My bus is too big, but your car can do it.

Reasoning that I would rather take a detour for hours on a bad road than sit in my car in a traffic jam, I thanked him and drove away, past the parked cars and the children and the protesting teachers, through the bowl of a green valley and into the hills that looked rockier and drier in the distance.

the journey is the goal.

The train was sunlit and emptier.

My idea was that I would have lunch in Mexicali and hurry back to Calexico, but this line of people was daunting, moving so slowly that I decided to skip lunch and just look.

I was traveling south in sunshine, euphoric again, on the open road.

every trip is unique.

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

I stopped simply to look around, in the idle curiosity that is available to any person with a car in Mexico and no particular place to go.

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.

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 travel, the sex, the writing, the romances, were—so Norman Sherry suggests—all attempts by Greene to relieve his depression. He was an authentic melancholic.

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

D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, and Aldous Huxley—all visitors, inspired in their writing by their immersion in Oaxaca—would recognize

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.

Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home.