The Tao of Travel

The exotic dream, not always outlandish, is a dream of what we lack and so crave. And in the world of the exotic, which is always an old world peopled by the young or ageless, time stands still.—

SWS

It is sometimes the way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling.—

GTES

Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten.—

FAF

Because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler.—

POH

In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.—

POH

In travel you meet people who try to lay hold of you, who take charge like parents, and criticize. Another of travel's pleasures was turning your back on them and leaving and never having to explain.—

KBS

Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts.—

GRB

All travel is circular ... After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.—

GRB

It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell.—

HIO

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.—

POH

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealized versions of home—indeed, looking for the perfect memory.—

FAF

When strangers asked me where I was going I often replied, "Nowhere." Vagueness can become a habit, and travel a form of idleness.—

OPE

Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home.—

GTES

One of the happier and more helpful delusions of travel is that one is on a quest.—

GTES

I had gotten to Lower Egypt and was heading south in my usual traveling mood—hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable it is a banal subject for travel; therefore, Africa seemed a perfect place for a long journey.—

DSS