Travel Quotes

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.

~ William Least Heat-Moon

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

~ Alain De Botton

Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.

~ Tahir Shah

will I ever get over the pull I feel to both of these places?

~ Sara Ferguson

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.

~ Damon Galgut

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.

~ Angela Carter

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

~ Alice Munro

It's hard to be less than happy when you can be happy with less.

~ Chris Brady

These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind

~ Hilaire Belloc

And guess what? I have to admit.. I kinda start liking it here.

~ Winna Efendi

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

Always stay sharp on railways and cruise ships for transit has a way of making everything clear.

~ Anna Godbersen

Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character.

~ Truman Capote

There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)

~ Bret Easton Ellis

I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh.

~ Isabella L. Bird

When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.

~ Frank Delaney

Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?

~ Werner Herzog

[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret.

~ Michael Chabon

The desert doesn't care who you are, and neither does anyone or anything who lives in it.

~ Deanne Stillman

The idea of my heart dancing with delight was far too good to pass up.

~ Tahir Shah

I wish she’d said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can’t hide from it, not even here.

~ Raquel Cepeda

Globalization by the way of McDonald’s and KFC has captured the hearts, the minds, and from what I can see through the window, the growing bellies of the folks here.

~ Raquel Cepeda

Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.

~ Tahir Shah

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

~ Graham Greene

The great glory of travel, to me, is not just what I see that's new to me in countries visited, but that in almost every one of them I change from an outsider looking in to an insider looking out.

~ Clara E. Laughlin

Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters.

~ Jan Wong

They say life is a highway and we all travel our own roads, some good, some bad, yet each is a blessing of its own.

~ Jess Chief Brynjulson

I nearer than I was yesterday and further than I am today, tomorrow I'll be square one.

~ Racquel Mcdonnell

A wise man travels to discover himself.

~ James Russell Lowell

Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, inexplicable and impenetrable, at any view, instantly seen and always, always delightful? Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

~ Elizabeth Bishop

Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.

~ William Dalrymple

You sell off the kingdom piece by piece and trade it for a horse that will take you anywhere.

~ Colin Wright

Far too many people on the spectrum spend most of their days with people who carry around memories of, and are often too overwhelmed by incidents of, prior misinterpretation. This is no fun. In travel you can start over, and reinvent yourself. If somehow a relationship gets weird, you can leave and go to the next town, the next block, or whatever the case may be, and try again.

~ Michael John Carley

As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.

~ E.m. Forster

If travel has momentum and wants to stay in motion, as I mentioned earlier, then adventure has the gravitational pull of a black hole. The more you do it, the more you find a way to keep doing it.

~ Josh Gates

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

~ William Least Heat-Moon

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...

~ Théophile Gautier

The world isn't built with a ramp.

~ Walt Balenovich

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.

~ Bill Bryson