On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale. — RIR
One of the reasons we are still ignorant of what space travel or lunar exploration is like: no astronaut has shown any ability to convey the experience in writing. There has never been a Melville on the moon, or even an Updike. — FAF
Lawrence's journeys by post-bus or cold late train or on foot are in that great laborious tradition which produced genuine travel books — the eye slowly taking it all in, the aching feet imposing the leisure to observe the common people in the smoky inn kitchen.
— Anthony Burgess, Introduction, Lawrence and Italy (1972)
[Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi] has all the normal stigmata of the travel book, the fake intensities, the tendency to discover the "soul" of a town after spending two hours in it, the boring descriptions of conversations with taxi-drivers.
— George Orwell, in the weekly Tribune, December 4, 1942, in Orwelclass="underline" Complete Works (1968)
The Speed of Travel
I came to realize that I traveled best when I traveled no faster than a dog could trot.
— Gardner McKay, Journey Without a Map (2009)
Time Travel
The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life. — GTES
Travel is so often an experiment with time. In Third World countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present — but the present contains the future. — KBS
Travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite. Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life, or seeing clearly a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid and sometimes thrilling is the juxtaposition of the present and the past. — HIO
A true journey is much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, hurrying then having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward. — GTES
Traveling in a Time of Trouble
A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eyewitness. — GTES
Travel and Love
If one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier. — GTES
Smell a Country to Understand It
[Kipling's] gift is to make people see (for the first condition of right thought is right sensation, the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it).
— T. S. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1943)
Travel as a Love Affair
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with… All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
— Pico Iyer, "Why We Travel,"Salon (2000)
Tourism and Sightseeing
The tourist is part of the landscape of our civilization, as the pilgrim was in the Middle Ages.
— V. S. Pritchett, The Spanish Temper (1954)
He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to the another.
— Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)
Tourists don't know where they've been, I thought. Travelers don't know where they're going. — HIO
In Mumbai: A tourist would have been in a temple or a museum. I had been in a slum. — GTES
Sightseeing is an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity. — GRB
Sightseeing was a way of passing the time, but… it was activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled. — GRB
Sightseeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel… It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits. — SWS
Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain. — TEE
Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest. — OPE
Nothing is more bewildering to a foreigner than a nation's pleasures. — KBS
Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living — indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor. — GTES
It is almost axiomatic that air travel has wished tourists on only the most moth-eaten countries in the world: tourism, never more energetically pursued than in static societies, is usually the mobile rich making a blind blundering visitation on the inert poor. — OPE
Tourists will believe almost anything as long as they are comfortable. — HIO
After a man has made a large amount of money he becomes a bad listener and an impatient tourist. — POH
She saw their travels in terms of adverts and a long talcum-white beach with the tropical breeze tossing the palms and her hair; he saw it in terms of forbidden foods, frittered-away time, and ghastly expenses.
— Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (2009)
Departures
There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window, and disappears, and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy. — OPE