Travel Quotes - Page 40

On a morning from a Bogart movie, in a country where they turn back time. You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre, contemplating a crime. She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain. Don't bother asking for explanations, she'll just tell you that she came in the year of the cat.

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

Look at that wonderful moonlight. It makes me long for the time when I can return home.

There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't.

They have just succeeded in raising the two thousand pounds here, by subscription, that was wanted towards an exploration fund, for fitting out an expedition, that will probably start for the interior of our continent next March.

It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.

A wise traveler never despises his own country.

You've climbed the highest mountain in the world. What's left ? It's all downhill from there. You've got to set your sights on something higher than Everest.

In San Francisco, Halloween is redundant.

Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

I've been to Paris. And it ain't that pretty at all.

To be a stranger in a strange land: Whenever one feasts, one thinks of one's brother twice as much as before, There where my brother far away is ascending, The dogwood is flowering, and a man is missed.

There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

To take a journey of a thousand miles, you have to begin with the first step from the place where you stand; the romantic description of the journey and the things the body sees on the way and the description of the scenery are of no use unless you lift your foot and take the first step.

It's a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.

Just a rock, a dome of snow, the deep blue sky, and a hunk of orange-painted metal from which a shredded American flag cracked in the wind. Nothing more. Except two tiny figures walking together those last few feet to the top of the Earth.

Those horses must have been Spanish jennets, born of mares mated with a zephyr; for they went as swiftly as the wind, and the moon, which had risen at our departure to give us light, rolled through the sky like a wheel detached from its carriage.

Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home?

Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

There's nothing American tourists like more than the things they can get at home.

We travel because we do not know. We know that we do not know the best before we start. That is why we start. But we forget that we do not know the worst either. That is why we come back.

I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.