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Travel

  • It is such a bewildered, scared feeling to go for the first time to a place and not know where to call out to the driver to stop.

  • First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

  • ... travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains ...

  • From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.

  • When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.

  • There are few certainties when you travel. One of them is that the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.

    • Erma Bombeck,
    • When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home
    • ()
  • I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

  • Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock.

  • Travelling is like a novel: it's what happens that counts.

    • George Sand,
    • 1867, in Francis Steegmuller and Barbara Bray, eds., Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence ()
  • There is no substitute for the riches gained on a lifetime basis by the young American who studies or works abroad.

  • There are two phases of enjoyment in journeying through an unknown country — the eager phase of wondering interest in every detail, and the relaxed phase when one feels no longer an observer of the exotic, but a participator in the rhythm of daily life.

  • Maybe tips act as a magnet for all our insecurities. Maybe they're the final exam on our ability to survive on our own; will we leave too much out of nervous apology for our lives, or not enough, out of sheer incompetence?

  • ... parents needn't bother driving small children around to see the purple mountains' majesties; the children will go right on duking it out in the back seat and whining for food as if you were showing them Cincinnati. No one under twenty really wants to look at scenery.

  • To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.

  • The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.

  • A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will.

    • Freya Stark,
    • "On Traveling With a Notebook," in The Cornhill Magazine ()
  • The essence of travel is diffuse. It is never there on the spot as it were, but always beyond: its symbol is the horizon, and its interest always lies over that edge in the unseen.

    • Freya Stark,
    • "The Travel Essay," in The Cornhill Magazine ()
  • ... the true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home ...

  • What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.

    • Freya Stark,
    • 1928, in Caroline Moorehead, ed., Over the Rim of the World: Freya Stark Selected Letters ()
  • O what can be so forlorn in its forlorn parts as this traveling? the ceaseless packing and unpacking, the heartless, uncongenial intercourses, the cheerless hotel, the many hours when you are too tired and your feelings too much dissipated to settle to any pursuit, yet you either have nothing to look at or are weary of looking.

    • Margaret Fuller,
    • letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1843), in Perry Miller, ed., Margaret Fuller: American Romantic ()
  • I have learned this strange thing, too, about travel: one may return to a place and, quite unexpectedly, meet oneself still lingering there from the last time.

  • ... one's travel life is basically as incommunicable as his sex life is ...

  • It is always a taut moment in a foreign country waiting to see if your English-speaking guide speaks English ...

  • Like a chastity belt, the package tour keeps you out of mischief but a bit restive for wondering what you missed.

  • On their return from a trip, it is wise to see friends promptly, before they've had time to get their pictures developed.

  • 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.

  • The greatest mercy, I have often thought, of the Mediterranean coast lies in its mosquitoes. Did we not suffer from their unwelcome attention, we could not bear our holidays to end.

    • Winifred Holtby,
    • "The Right Side of Thirty" (1930), Pavements at Anderby ()
  • This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.

  • One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.

  • The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?

  • Traveling together is a great test, which has damaged many friendships and even honeymoons, and some people such as [Thomas] Gray and Horace Walpole, never feel quite the same to one another again, and it is nobody's fault, as one knows if one listens to the stories of both, though it seems to be some people's fault more than others.

  • The fabric of my faithful love / No power shall dim or ravel / Whilst I stay here, — but oh, my dear, / If I should ever travel!

  • My heart is warm with the friends I make, / And better friends I'll not be knowing; / Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, / No matter where it's going.

  • There are three very good reasons to travel: 1. See the world. 2. Meet new people. 3. Room service.

  • Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.

  • It is also possible, I believe, if one lives in India long enough, to come across a globe-trotter who is modest and teachable, but we have been out here only twenty-two years, and I am going home without having seen one.

  • I love medieval cities; they do not clamor for attention; they possess their souls — their riches — in quiet; formal, courteous, they reveal themselves slowly, stone by stone, garden by garden; hidden treasures wait calmly to be loved and yield to introspective wandering.

  • One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.

  • There are places one comes home to that one has never been to ...

  • The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. ... Is this true?

  • Traveling is a feast for the senses.

  • Almost all travel is lost on teen-agers. ... The young do not discover the world. They discover themselves, and travel only interrupts their trips to the interior.

  • You travel to discover yourself. At home there is known to you only the girl you remember. Who you really have become, you do not know. When you travel, that person emerges: she is mirrored in the faces of people you meet.

  • The middle-aged bring to the idea of travel the romanticism with which they once gilded the idea of meeting a new man. Something will happen, they know not what.

  • The born traveler shouldn't be a besotted reader. Traveling interrupts reading.

  • We travel not to discover new lands or new people, but new selves.

  • My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.

  • A hotel is a hotel all the world over, a place essentially vulgar, commonplace, venal, the travesty of a human home.

  • We perfectly agreed in our ideas of traveling; we hurried from place to place as fast as horses and wheels, and curses and guineas, could carry us.

  • ... it is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing.

  • ... abroad it is our habit to regard all other travelers in the light of personal and unpardonable grievances. They are intruders into our chosen realms of pleasure, they jar upon our sensibilities, they lessen our meager share of comforts, they are everywhere in our way, they are always an unnecessary feature in the landscape.

  • When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.

    • Agnes Repplier,
    • "The American Takes a Holiday," Times and Tendencies ()
  • The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.

    • Agnes Repplier,
    • "The American Takes a Holiday," Times and Tendencies ()
  • The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.

    • Agnes Repplier,
    • "The American Takes a Holiday," Times and Tendencies ()
  • The tourist may complain of other tourists; but he would be lost without them. He may find them in his way, taking up the best seats in the motors, and the best tables in the hotel dining-rooms; but he grows amazingly intimate with them during the voyage, and not infrequently marries one of them when it is over.

    • Agnes Repplier,
    • "The American Takes a Holiday," Times and Tendencies ()
  • Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.

    • Agnes Repplier,
    • "The American Takes a Holiday," Times and Tendencies ()
  • At Doybayzit, the last little town en route to the Persian frontier-post, I stayed in the local doss-house ... The squalid bedding was inhabited by a host of energetic fleas, but their attentions were wasted on me and within minutes of retiring I was sound asleep. Some hours later I awoke to find myself bereft of bedding and to see a six-foot, scantily-clad Kurd bending over me in the moonlight. My gun was beneath the pillow and one shot fired at the ceiling concluded the matter. I felt afterwards that my suitor had showed up rather badly; a more ardent admirer, of his physique, could probably have disarmed me without much difficulty.

  • ... traveling is as much a passion as love, poetry, or ambition.

  • ... sight-seeing gratifies us in different ways. First, there is the pleasure of novelty; secondly, either that of admiration or fault-finding — the latter a very animated enjoyment.

  • Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

  • 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.

  • People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

  • I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

  • Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong.

  • Travel is in sad case. It is uncomfortable, it is expensive; it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to ourselves.

  • ... travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen ...

  • The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.

  • How subtle is the relationship between the traveler and his luggage! He knows, as no one else knows, its idiosyncrasies, its contents ... and always some small nuisance which he wishes he had not brought; had known, indeed, before starting that he would regret it, but brought it all the same.

  • Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.

    • Anaïs Nin,
    • 1969, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 7 ()
  • We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

    • Anaïs Nin,
    • 1969, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 7 ()
  • The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.

    • Anaïs Nin,
    • 1974, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 7 ()
  • Rain is my lover, my apple strudel. / It haunts my heels like a pedigreed poodle. / Beyond the seas or across the nation, / It follows me faithful on every vacation.

    • Phyllis McGinley,
    • "Notes Written on a Damp Veranda," The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley ()
  • All amateur travellers have experienced horror journeys, long or short, sooner or later, one way or another. As a student of disaster, I note that we react alike to our tribulations: frayed and bitter at the time, proud afterwards. Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

  • In the shortest sea voyage there is no sense of time. You have been down in the cabin for hours or days or years. Nobody knows or cares. You know all the people to the point of indifference. You do not believe in dry land any more — you are caught in the pendulum itself, and left there, idly swinging.

  • Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. This is what life has taught me.

  • Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

  • Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard — the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

  • Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

  • The expense of living abroad, I always supposed to be high, but my ideas were nowise adequate to the thing.

    • Abigail Adams,
    • to her sister, Mary Smith Cranch (1784), Letters of Mrs. Adams ()
  • Fitz Allen had 'traveled;' and that is generally understood to mean to go abroad and remain a period of time long enough to grow a fierce beard, and fierce mustache, and cultivate a thorough contempt for everything in your own country.

  • Hotel life is about the same in every latitude.

  • ... some travelers are drawn forward by a goal lying before them in the way iron is drawn to the magnet. Others are driven on by a force lying behind them. In such a way the bowstring makes the arrow fly.

  • The unsuspected is the daily fare of the traveler in Thibet ...

  • The days are, happily, now long past when the cherished tradition of the Englishwoman, that one's oldest and worst garments possessed the most suitable characteristics for wear in travelling, excited the derision of foreign nations, and made the British female abroad an object of terror and avoidance to all beholders.

  • I don't know how it is the most unattractive creatures of every nation seem to be the ones who travel.

  • She discovered that leaving one's native country for the first time brought pangs of nostalgic, half-forgotten patriotism, a sort of premature homesickness.

  • ... you can pack a bag and take a plane somewhere, anywhere, and when you get there and open the bag — lying right on top will be whatever you're running away from. The very first thing you'll have to unpack ...

  • ... their ill-concealed indifference to his travels and their interest in local affairs soon cured him of travellers' tales and he began to realize the deep truth that no one, broadly speaking, ever wishes to hear what you have been doing.

  • ...those of us who travel tend to stretch the truth on occasion.

  • ...most travelers have time, money, and a sense of adventure not available to everyone.

  • In my own traveler's bill of rights, I'm putting in the undeniable right to have a lousy time.

  • We subscribe to the thumbprint school of travel, which commits us to spending at least a week in one spot no larger than my thumbprint will cover on a standard folding road map ...

  • Foreigners can't help living abroad because they were born there, but for an English person to go is ridiculous, especially now that the sun-tan lamps are so readily available.

  • Traveling would be quite perfect if only one could go home at night.

    • Clover Adams,
    • 1872, in Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life ()
  • Too often travelling is a Fool's Paradise. I am miserable; I want to get out of myself; I want to leave home. ... I go to the very ends of the earth; and behold, my skeleton steps out of its cup-board and confronts me there. ... the last thing I can lose is myself ...

  • A trip is what you take when you can't take any more of what you've been taking.

    • Adeline Ainsworth,
    • in Peg Bracken, But I Wouldn't Have Missed It for the World! ()
  • [On visiting Westminster Abbey:] Holy Moses! Have a look! / Flesh decayed in every nook! / Some rare bits of brain lie here, / Mortal loads of beef and beer.

  • ... the success of a holiday depends on what you find for yourself on the spot, not what you bring with you.

  • ... long journeys are strange things: if we were always to continue in the same mind we are in at the end of a journey, we should never stir from the place we were then in: but Providence in kindness to us causes us to forget it. It is much the same with lying-in women. Heaven permits this forgetfulness that the world may be peopled, and that folks may take journeys to Provence.

    • Madame de Sévigné,
    • 1671, Letters of Madame de Sévigné to Her Daughter and Her Friends, vol. 1 ()
  • Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.

  • ... before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison.

  • All my adult life, an insatiable curiosity has propelled me toward the next home, the next job, the next trip. It's as though, when I was born, some cosmic joke flung bits of me around the planet, and I've been on a lifelong scavenger hunt to find those parts of my psyche that lie outside this sack of flesh and bones.

  • Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.

  • Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

  • Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

  • Traveling by motor is just one situation after another. ... No matter what happens, don't scream; a scream at the wrong moment has often been known to cause a stall.

  • Like love, travel makes you innocent again.

  • Adventure is not something you travel to find. It's something you take with you, or you're not going to find it when you arrive.

  • She crossed borders recklessly, refusing to recognize limits, saying 'bonjour and 'buon giorno' as though she owned both France and Italy and the day itself. ... she was free to grasp it all: to bite into fruit that had ripened on other people's trees; to warm herself in the sun they had hung out and rip, with her headlights, their darkness.

  • ... we can't know a road until we travel it. Hearing about it is not enough. We are obliged to travel over it.

  • Nobody ought to be too old to improve: I should be sorry if I was; and I flatter myself I have already improved considerably by my travels. First, I can swallow gruel soup, egg soup, and all manner of soups, without making faces much. Secondly, I can pretty well live without tea ...

  • Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home?

  • 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?

  • [On Malaysia:] Mr. Darwin says so truly that a visit to the tropics (and such tropics) is like a visit to a new planet. This new wonder-world, so enchanting, tantalising, intoxicating, makes me despair, for I cannot make you see what I am seeing!

  • Surely one advantage of traveling is that, while it removes much prejudice against foreigners and their customs, it intensifies tenfold one's appreciation of the good at home ...

  • I desired the fate of figureheads / Which leave port early and return late / I am jealous of the return and the departure / And of the wet corals tied about their throats. ... / Since, from the depths of danger, one returns more beautiful, / Returning with a face burning and fabled.

  • ... no matter where we went we always acted like travelers, never tourists.

  • It isn't necessarily the great and famous beauty spots we fall in love with. As with people, so with places. Love is unforeseen, and we can all find ourselves affectionately attached to the minor and the less obvious.

    • Muriel Spark,
    • "Side Roads of Tuscany," in The New York Times ()
  • Those long rides, these night waits, brought unforgettable looks into human lives. Strange how travelers will confide their ambitions, unload their secrets, show their scars to strangers.

  • ... life is short and traveling seems to make it that much longer.

    • Laura Fraser,
    • "The Art of the Getaway," in O: The Oprah Magazine ()
  • To lose your prejudices you must travel.

  • There is a fine line to be drawn between the urge to travel and the search for freedom ...

  • When you are traveling / and find yourself alone, / it is not wise / to think of yourself as ignorant.

    • Charlotte DeClue,
    • "Ijajee's Story," in Joseph Bruchac, ed., Songs From This Earth on Turtle's Back ()
  • The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

    • Colette,
    • Paris From My Window
    • ()
  • But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn't.

  • Women can't travel light. We're in charge of the basic facts.

  • To visit a new country for the first time is great fun; but it is even greater fun to introduce somebody else to a country that you know.

    • Jan Struther,
    • "Personally Conducted," A Pocketful of Pebbles ()
  • We change our skies but not our hearts who go across the seas.

  • Most passport pictures are good likenesses, and it is time we faced it.

    • Katharine Brush,
    • "Things I Have Learned in My Travels," This Is On Me ()
  • Most forward-thinking Caribbean airlines now put the following information on your ticket, in order to ease confusion: The destination to which they are sending you. The destination to which they are sending your luggage.

  • Traveling with a man, you are bound to make at least one Important Discovery. Sometimes it's that you are living with a total stranger. Or, sometimes, it's that he's living with a total stranger. But you would not find these things out if the two of you just sat home all the time.

  • Having traveled initially to get away, ultimately we travel to come home.

  • Perhaps for totemic reasons, people like to possess a piece of the country they are visiting. Women like to wear it. Men like to eat it.

  • All too often, when people don't know where they are, have jet lag, don't speak the language, and can't figure out the money or maintain intestinal regularity, they get hostile.

  • To me travel is a triple delight: anticipation, performance, and recollection.

  • When traveling abroad if you see something you yearn for if you can afford it at all, buy it. If you don't you'll regret it all your life.

  • Travel may be uncomfortable; it may be downright painful or dangerous, tedious or fatiguing; one may encounter climates that depress, freeze, or suffocate, foods than sicken, and bugs that bite, and the hotel doesn't exist that shelters one as felicitously as one's own home, but the traveler born is stimulated rather than deterred by hardship and the unexpected, and it is rare indeed that he regrets a journey into the unknown or a return visit to the foreign but familiar and beloved.

  • Like building a house, travel always costs more than you estimate.

  • How could I go on my travels without that sweet soul waiting at home for my letters?

  • Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign.

    • Margaret Atwood,
    • in Mitchell Smith, "Dry-Land Sailors Scupper Plan to Bring Drake Home," Toronto Star ()
  • No one, who has not travelled abroad unknown and depending for all society upon writtten introductions, can form any idea of the utter inadequacy of the ordinary letter of introduction.

  • All the earth is seamed with roads, and all the sea is furrowed with the tracks of ships, and over all the roads and all the waters a continuous stream of people passes up and down — traveling, as they say, for their pleasure. What is it, I wonder, that they go out to see?

  • [On her passport photo:] If I look like this, I need the trip!

  • A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer ...

  • Oughta be a law everybody has to take a trip every two years just to make 'em realize how good home is.

  • ... the family on vacation doesn't truly travel — it explores itself.

  • There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.

  • Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.

  • When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

  • ... it is my belief that one should learn patience in a foreign land, for I take it that this is the true measure of travel. If one does not suffer some frustration of the ordinary reflexes, how can one be sure one is really traveling?

  • ... great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

  • I wonder the human race has been so fond of migrations, when the young take so hardly to traveling ...

  • Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this my station.'

  • ... for many people traveling can have deep psychological meaning.

  • The curious vacuum in which one exists during a voyage, in which one set of problems has been left behind and the need has not yet arisen to grapple with a new set, was over.

  • When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.

  • It's obvious that five days is just enough to give one a false impression of any country.

  • Every land has its own special rhythm, and unless the traveler takes the time to learn the rhythm, he or she will remain an outsider there always.

  • ... I've always thought I was looking for myself whenever I traveled. Like a journey anywhere was really a journey through myself.

  • Suffering makes you deep. Travel makes you broad. In case I get my pick, I'd rather travel.

  • ... the only time travelers are really gay is when they are traveling for no good reason at all.

  • Many Americans think of the rest of the world as a kind of Disneyland, a showplace for quaint fauna, flora and artifacts. They dress for travel in cheap, comfortable, childish clothes, as if they were going to the zoo and would not be seen by anyone except the animals.

  • He ... wondered why his plane always landed at a gate twenty minutes' brisk walk from ground transportation. Somebody had to land at all those gates close to the exit. Why was it never him?

  • Who was it said that you never get to a place until a day after you come, nor leave it until a day after you go?

  • There's nothing like a gleam of humor to reassure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face.

  • I've always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals ... I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?

  • While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.

  • [On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?

  • ... travel has been stepped up to such a speed that one can have dinner in New York and indigestion in Madrid ...

  • Traveling is seeing; it is the implicity that we travel by.

    • Cynthia Ozick,
    • "Enchanters at First Encounter," in The New York Times ()
  • I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.

  • Finally one tires / of so many spires.

    • Cynthia Ozick,
    • "The 21st Cathedral of the Week," in The New York Times Magazine ()
  • The people at the inn had all the reluctance of their kind to lay their cards on the table. They agreed doubtfully that it was an inn and, on being pressed, that it would be possible to have some food there. But they said, brightening wonderfully, it would not be ready for ages ...

  • I love the melody of an unknown language, the strange food, all the surprises of a strange town, and my own impatience and curiosity ... I love traveling as others love the gaming table; I anticipate a new place as others anticipate the next number to come up.

    • Elsa Triolet,
    • "Notebooks Buried," A Fine of Two Hundred Francs ()
  • Like good wine, our family does not travel well.

  • Traveling is so complicated. There are so many people everywhere. I make my best journeys on my couch.

    • Coco Chanel,
    • in Marcel Haedrich, Coco Chanel: Her Life, Her Secrets ()
  • The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster.

  • ... on a holiday lonely persons always feel their loneliness more keenly.

  • Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.

  • The laws all true wanderers obey are these: 'Thou shalt not eat nor drink more than thy share,' 'Thou shalt not lie about the places thou hast visited or the distances thou hast traversed.'

  • I have led a free, wandering life for so long now that I should find myself quite incapable of settling down ... Women like myself can neither bring happiness into a domestic life, nor (even under the most desirable circumstances) find it there ...

  • They conducted themselves as much like a pair of illiterate cattle drovers on a world tour as was possible, continually repeating with a relish no one else savored that deplorable old story of the two American tourists who arrive one morning at the Louvre where one of them says to the other, 'You take the inside, I'll take the outside and I'll meet you here in ten minutes.'

  • Never a ship sails out of the bay, / But carries my heart as a stowaway.

  • I think that to get under the surface and really appreciate the beauty of any country, one has to go there poor.

  • He didn't like to travel much, but he didn't mind it in other people.

  • ... the loneliest place to be is a hotel room in a big city in early evening.

  • Old age is a disease from which there is no recovery but the old nun's recent attack had certainly been brought on chiefly by the fatigue of so much travelling.

  • Do you know anyone who absolutely loves to pack? Neither do we.

  • ... I always think that the most delightful thing about traveling is to always be running into Americans and to always feel at home.

  • Mothers and wives who travel begin to claim rights of financial independence, leadership qualities, assertiveness, confidence, a sense of self, peer esteem, physical stature, strength, sexual impregnability, and creditability. When a woman is empowered with these rights, her societal role is more similarly situated and equal to men. Once she experiences this liberation, travel becomes not just a temporary self liberation, not a necessary personal tonic but an addictive drug for her social equilibrium.

    • Martha Dundon,
    • "Women Who Travel," in Marybeth Bond and Pamela Michael, eds., A Mother's World: Journeys of the Heart ()
  • People who travel are always fugitives.

  • ... when we travel, most of us take too much. I always work on the assumption that I'm going to take everything with me because I don't want the second wife to have anything if the plane crashes.

  • A nomad I was even when I was very small and would stare at the road, that white spellbinding road headed straight for the unknown ... a nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.

  • Now more than ever do I realize that I shall never be content with a sedentary life, and that I shall always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

  • All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.

  • Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

  • We of the third sphere are unable to look at Europe or at Asia as they may survey each other. Wherever we go, across Pacific or Atlantic, we meet, not similarity so much as 'the bizarre.' Things astonish us, when we travel, that surprise nobody else.

  • We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own ...

    • Maria Mitchell,
    • diary (1873), in Phebe Mitchell Kendall, ed., Maria Mitchell, Life, Letters, and Journals ()
  • One thing about tourists is that it is very easy to get away from them. Like ants they follow a trail and a few yards each side of that trail there are none.

  • A detailed account of your trip will be a joy forever after you get home, but it will be an everlasting nuisance along the way.

  • ... we are just as apt to meet the grandmothers as the wolves when we go traveling.

  • Speak often of Heaven to those who approach you, make them love it as well as the virtues which are required before we can be admitted to our beloved country. For if you know how to draw souls there by your zeal, your good example and your exemplary religious conduct, you may be assured the gates will be opened for you also. I wanted to go to Heaven, but what with one thing and another we have entered the New York Bay. The superintendent of the Customs House Officers and Doctor are all on board.

    • Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini,
    • 1894, in Giovanni Serpentelli, ed., The Travels of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini As Related in Several of Her Letters ()
  • Wanderlust can be the most glorious thing in the world sometimes, but when it gnaws and pricks at your innards, especially in spring, with your hands and feet tied, it's awful.

  • Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.

  • ... I had the real explorer's spirit which is both complaining and insular ...

  • This is what holidays, travels, vacations are about. It is not really rest or even leisure we chase. We strain to renew our capacity for wonder, to shock ourselves into astonishment once again.

  • Americans ought to be the best-traveled, most cosmopolitan people on earth, not only because experience of the world is desirable in its own right, but because as a people acquires a great concentration of power, worldliness becomes a moral imperative.

  • Tourists moved over the piazza like drugged insects on a painted plate ...

  • Sunshine is more health-giving than pills and potions: and travel in foreign lands is a mental tonic, which feeds the mind even if it empties the pocket.

  • But I should like to take these things on full gallop, instead of dawdling along gaping at them. I get fearfully tired, and a very little Abbey goes a long way with me.

    • Susan Hale,
    • letter (1868), in Caroline P. Atkinson, ed., Letters of Susan Hale ()
  • ... drawbacks are good when you are on holiday. If the holiday were too good you might not want to go home again ...

  • It's especially fitting that they call a cruise ship 'she,' for she is pregnant with a thousand adult embryos who long to stay forever warm and sheltered in this great white womb.

  • Mail from home was so important when you were traveling. It kept you in touch with the familiar, even the part you were running from.

  • An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.

  • We all ended up somewhere with our various uncertain lives flapping about us in tatters and our pockets full of foreign coins.

  • For a long time I turned up my nose at Hawaii. We who call ourselves travelers are snobs of the worst kind. We would much prefer to be wildly uncomfortable on the cushionless seats of a bus in Bangladesh or a train traversing the Gobi desert, moving slowly through some strange desolate landscape and feeling either boiling hot or freezing cold, with nothing to eat, no toilet paper and nothing to read, surrounded by hostile people who don't speak our language and perhaps want to convert us to their religion or to steal all our money, than to do anything so gauche as to enjoy ourselves in any sort of tropical paradise, particularly if it means that another Westerner, a mere tourist, might be anywhere in sight.

    • Barbara Wilson,
    • "Belladonna," in Sara Paretsky, ed., Women on the Case ()
  • [On visiting Ireland:] ... he was the last person on earth to take upon a pleasure outing, as he regarded all strangers as rogues and villains, and the Irish people as heathen papists, worshiping idols in the few moments unoccupied in breaking each other's heads with shillalahs.

  • Traveling renews you.

    • k.d. lang,
    • in Victoria Starr, k.d. lang ()
  • [On accepting travel suggestions from her two daughters, 6 and 3:] When they pay for the vacation, they get to dictate where we go.

  • The motto of this agency is We Never Knowingly Ruin Your Vacation.

    • Amy Hempel,
    • "Tonight Is a Favor to Holly," Reasons to Live ()
  • In many societies being feminine has been defined as sticking close to home. Masculinity, by contrast, has been the passport for travel. Feminist geographers and ethnographers have been amassing evidence revealing that a principal difference between women and men in countless societies has been the license to travel away from a place thought of as 'home.'

  • This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it.

  • I've become obsessed with the idea of reconciliation, particularly reconciliation with nature but with people too, of course. I think that travel has been a kind of search for that, a pursuit for unity and even an attempt to contribute to a sense of unity.

    • Jan Morris,
    • in Philip Gourevitch, ed., The Paris Review Interviews, III ()
  • Taking to the road — by which I mean letting the road take you — changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories — in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.

  • I love hotels. I wouldn't mind living in one. Their neutral, ghostly atmosphere is very inspiring and sad.