Dervla Murphy Quotes

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts, and a few days later I decided to cycle to India ... However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.

For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.' And

Strong bonds are forged in high emotional temperatures.

I wonder if those experts who tell us that our sexual appetite is the strongest know what real thirst feels like; I can imagine the desire for water driving someone to commit a crime to which sexual desire could never drive them.

This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.

Even a brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to help understand what we are

Perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling.

[On Addis Ababa:] Among the city's handicaps are an immaturity for which no one can be blamed, as it was founded only eighty years ago, and a proliferation of architectural excesses for which many people can and should be blamed.

Undoubtedly the Afghans must be, by our standards, the best-looking people in the world. They have everything; height, proportions, carriage, features and complexion.

Hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.

The sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.

To me writing was not a career but a necessity. And so it remains, though I am now, technically, a professional writer. The strength of this inborn desire to write has always baffled me. It is understandable that the really gifted should feel an overwhelming urge to use their gift; but a strong urge with only a slight gift seems almost a genetic mistake.

There has been a sustained and dreadfully successful campaign to make most people dissatisfied with what I would call the normal life and some would call the simple life.

Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship 'economic growth' - the ultimate unreality in a finite world.

One of the advantages of cycling is that it automatically prevents a journey from becoming an Expedition.

The Irish have a flair for wringing from death the last drop of emotion and they do not quite understand those who react otherwise.

Life would be just a neutral wasteland if one always ran away from the joys of love merely because one knew that pain and grief might be involved too.

If I Am murdered en route it will have been well worth while!

Sunnis consider Shias a pack of unwholesome fanatics and Shias consider Sunnis a gang of lukewarm no-goods - there's nothing like religion for spreading brotherly love!

One feels guilty on behalf of Western civilisation. What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost - a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?

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.

Whatever the theologians might say about heaven being in a state of union with God, I knew it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly for ever.

The more I see of unmechanized places and people the more conviced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between Man and Nature.

With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology.

Apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.