—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841)
Now my mind is made up. The whole journey is a trap. Travel does not broaden you so much as make you sophisticated, "up-to-date," taken in by the superficial with that really stupid look of a fellow serving on a beauty prize jury.
The look of a go-getter also. Worth no more. You can just as easily find your truth staring for forty-eight hours at some old tapestry.
—Henri Michaux,
Ecuador
(1970)
Travel, indeed, struck him as a being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience ... No doubt, for instance, that anyone can go on long voyages of exploration sitting by the fire, helping out his sluggish or refractory mind, if the need arises, by dipping into some book describing travels in distant lands.
—Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, in
Against Nature
by J.-K. Huysmans (1884), translated by Robert Baldick (1959)
You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy—being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders.—
GTES
The Traveler as a Voyeur
The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.
But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, "An aimless joy is a pure joy."—
GTES
Travel as Intrusion
It is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all sorts of spoil. This story [
Heart of Darkness],
and one other ... are all the spoil I brought out from the center of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.
—Joseph Conrad, Author's Note,
Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether
(1902)
Travel as Transformation
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
—Mark Twain,
Innocents Abroad
(1869)
There is a change that takes place in a man or a woman in transit. You see this at its most exaggerated on a ship when whole personalities change.
—John Steinbeck, letter, June 1960, in
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(1975)
The person who wrote these notes died upon stepping once again onto Argentine soil. The person who edits and polishes them, me, is no longer. At least I am not the person I was before. The vagabonding through our "America" has changed me more than I thought.
—Ernesto "Che" Guevara,
Notas de Viaje (The Motorcycle Diaries),
in Jon Lee Anderson,
Che
(2010)
The Traveler Must Be Worthy
The traveler must be himself, in men's eyes, a man worthy to live under the bent of God's heaven, and were it without a religion: he is such who has a clean human heart and long-suffering under his bare shirt; it is enough and though the way be full of harms, he may travel to the end of the world.
—C. M. Doughty,
Travels in Arabia Deserta
(1888)
Traveling Makes One Modest
To go back to Kuchuk [a courtesan and dancer in Esna]. You and I are thinking of her, but she is certainly not thinking of us. We are weaving an aesthetic around her, whereas this particular very interesting tourist who was vouchsafed the honors of her couch has vanished from her memory completely, like many others. Ah! Traveling makes one modest—you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
—Gustave Flaubert, in
Flaubert in Egypt,
translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)
Travel Writing
Literature is made out of the misfortunes of others. A large number of travel books fail simply because of the monotonous good luck of their authors.
—V. S. Pritchett,
Complete Essays
(1991)
Travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography ... The anonymous hotel room in a strange city drives one into the confessional mode.—
GRB
The difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows.—
GRB
When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.—
TEE
Whatever else travel writing is, it is certainly different from
writing a noveclass="underline" fiction requires close concentration and intense imagining, a leap of faith, magic almost. But a travel book, I discovered, was more the work of my left hand, and it was a deliberate act—like the act of travel itself. It took health and strength and confidence.—
TEE
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.—