Bruce Chatwin Quotes

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

~ Bruce Chatwin

Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.

~ Bruce Chatwin

Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder.

~ Bruce Chatwin

A journey is a fragment of Hell.

~ Bruce Chatwin

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

~ Bruce Chatwin

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

~ Bruce Chatwin

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

~ Bruce Chatwin