Quotes About Curiosity

I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness.

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

If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.

Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy.

I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere if you're not in a hurry.

Yet because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what's the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between.

It is fatal to know too much at the outset. Boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

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.

Sometimes a whispered word, or a single image or glimpse of humanity, can be a powerful motivation for looking deeper into the world.

Pimsa," Héctor said, passing the industrial park. "What's that?

The people on the platform stood watching from under large black umbrellas that shone with wetness

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.

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

Why is it . . . that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?

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

Just curiosity," I said. When he made a disapproving squint, I added, "Don't you go over now and then?" "Never been there," he said. "It's ten feet away!" "I'm staying here," he said, his squint now suggesting that I should be doing the same.

Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest.

the subject of boredom.

But curious to see the fence, I drove to the Rio Grande Valley, south to Harlingen, over to McAllen, and down Twenty-Third Street to International Boulevard and the frontier at Hidalgo, where the thing was obvious, ugly, and unambiguous.

Fascinated to know more, I joined them at breakfast

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.

Tempted by the names