Travel Writing Quotes

Be courageous: be still. ~ Gina Greenlee

The most amazing journey on earth is the journey of oneself. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Diving in IS testing the water. ~ Gina Greenlee

To travel is to find solace in this chaotic world ~ Anamika Mishra

I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing. ~ Lloyd Alexander

Being more aware will enable you to have only astonishing impressions, avoiding any of the disappointing experiences like some of those we went through. ~ Sahara Sanders

Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and Three Cups of Tea

Speaking of books that contain an element of travel, Greg Mortenson's bestseller about Central Asia was in the news recently. Were you surprised by the allegations that Three Cups of Tea contained fabrications?

No, I wasn't. One of the things The Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction. As for Three Cups of Tea, I think that philanthropists and humanitarians are even less forthcoming about what they do. I guess this guy did build a couple of schools in Afghanistan, but a self-promoting humanitarian is not someone I have a great deal of trust or belief in. I lived for six years in Africa and I've been to Africa numerous times since then. People build schools for their own reasons - not to improve a country.

The people I've known who've done great things of that type - you know, building hospitals, running schools - are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. Mi ~ Paul Theroux

When life hands you lemons, why stop at lemonade? Create an entire product line. ~ Gina Greenlee

I have travel to the places I have been because, I had a vivid imagination of the places. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward. ~ Paul Theroux

Every body has a unique path to travel. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely. ~ James A. Michener

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels. ~ Mark Twain

Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic. ~ Richard Halliburton

a good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" Taoist dictum quoted by Sam Miller ~ Sam Miller

I know when people think of New York, they think of theater, restaurants, cultural landmarks and shopping," I told him. "But beyond the iconic skyline and the news from Wall Street, New York is a collection of villages. In our neighborhoods, we attend school, play Kick the Can, handball and ride our bikes. I grew up knowing the names and faces of the baker, the shoe repair family, the Knish man and the Good Humor man who sold me and the other kids in my neighborhood half a popsicle for a nickel. My father took me to the playground where he pushed me on the swing, helped balance me on the seesaw and watched as I hung upside down by my feet on the monkey bars. Yes," I told the interviewer, "people actually grow up in New York. ~ Gina Greenlee

Sometimes it is just about taking the first step, only then can greatness find us. ~ Colleen Mariotti

What is a miracle if not the manifestation of light where darkness is expected? ~ Leigh Ann Henion

We only live once, so why not do something different? ~ Dayna Lovely

For all the energy directed toward the stratagem of big city living, New Yorkers are never too distracted to respond to, and more often, proactively assist visitors. Tourists tracing the routes of subway maps with their fingers, squinting at street signs or staring at a slip of paper with confusion are typical recipients of our generosity. We know our city can be as challenging as it is fascinating, and we want visitors to have a good experience. ~ Gina Greenlee

This was really something to experience: free restaurant menu of our choice, smiling and caring assistants who looked like Hollywood stars, warm blankets to cover our feet during the journey, personal video screens, lovely presents… every little thing was taken into account for our personal convenience. Any celebrity would be pleased with this type of service! It was an unforgettable flight - another shock during this holiday, and this time a pleasant one. ~ Sahara Sanders

I want to board a train, and leave my books behind. I want to be so caught up in writing about the journey, that I forget that fiction & fact are not the same. The destination does not signify. ~ Hannah Harding

The backstreet cafe in Casablanca was for me a place of mystery, a place with a soul, a place with danger. There was a sense that the safety nets had been cut away, that each citizen walked upon the high wire of this, the real world. I longed not merely to travel through it, but to live in such a city. ~ Tahir Shah

If it's true we only live once, then raise your red velvet curtain every chance you get. ~ Gina Greenlee

Whether by plane, bus or carpet,
own the magic in your ride. ~ Gina Greenlee

The cruise was the conduit for what would become my third book. While I was traveling and writing for ctnow.com, women across the United States and from the Caribbean emailed not to ask about my geographic journey but my existential one. "How do you find the courage to travel on your own?" they wondered. "How do you keep from getting lonely? Don't you feel self-conscious eating out alone?" After the first 30 emails like these I thought, There's a book here. It would be eight years before I published Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road. But the inspiration for publication came during the cruise. ~ Gina Greenlee

I guess the lesson is you can't go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can. ~ Charles Finch

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure. ~ Sara Sheridan

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. ~ Bill Bryson

We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301). ~ Jack Kerouac

Learning voyage, the greatest adventure. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

How many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Practice trust in small matters for huge returns in the large ones. ~ Gina Greenlee

Fear not your flame as you flood your caverns with firelight. ~ Gina Greenlee

During those days of whirling about the globe, I had an epiphany: travel was the only area of my life where I had no expectations. I anticipated nothing while fully engaging each moment. What bred adventure, surprise and deep experience was not knowing, surrendering to now and letting go of control. ~ Gina Greenlee

The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I'm surprised there weren't more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call 'passing') by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle. ~ Jennifer S. Alderson

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. ~ Paul Theroux

It feels like flying and landing to all the continents of the world with the use of my imaginary paper that can floats in the air. ~ Alexina Benavidez

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide. ~ Gerry Abbey

If you built the box, you can also break it down. ~ Gina Greenlee

The greatest pleasure does not consist in experiencing new things, but in savoring the infinite variation of what we already know ~ Federico Castigliano

The air was cool and soft. The desert looked empty from our great height, enough to believe the geographers and travel writers who tell of the terrible desert life, the stillness, harshness, and death. I lay against the cold sand, tiny grains dancing fast and furious across my skin. I saw insects and scorpions, the line of a snake. Mohammed said the dunes moved millimeters a day. They inched across the desert floor toward the ocean. I smiled. The geographers were blind. ~ C. Lynn Murphy

Explore the world with an open mind, a sturdy carry-on, and clothes that don't wrinkle! ~ Madeleine K. Albright

Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The true adventurer sees his glass as half full even when there are things swimming in it. ~ Randy Ross

And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board.
That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns - and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull. The Equator is just another valley; you aren't sure which and you don't much care. Quito is just another railroad station, with fuss about baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel. ~ Christopher Isherwood

Expectation is the dirtiest word in a traveler's vocabulary. ~ John Early

If you can overcome the occasional angst, you may have the chance to see some interesting things, perhaps the same things the tour buses bring people to see, but purified by solitude, if you will. In any case, do not stay in the hotel room. That is the only place you are vulnerable. ~ James Salter

On every travel, we saw beautiful landscapes. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The adventures of a lifetime begin with "Yes. ~ Gina Greenlee

A Nepali outlook, pace and philosophy had prevented us being swamped by our problems. In Nepal it was easier to take life day by day. ~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

There is a whole genre of funny travel writers - that's very popular. There's Bill Bryson and people who follow that route and sell travel writing through making people laugh. It's a very difficult group to take. The line between comedy and mockery is sometimes a bit thin. ~ John Gimlette

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves. ~ Gina Greenlee

Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart. ~ Pico Iyer

When you travel, buy a historical book about the place, read to increase your knowledge on the beautiful places of the world. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up into a top travel experience. ~ Pete McCarthy

Like flowers blooming through cement,
we, too, can grow beyond our cracks. ~ Gina Greenlee

Want more fizz in your life?
Shake things up. ~ Gina Greenlee

Until that rainy Sunday at the movies 31 years ago, for me, companionship had been a mandate for life's good times. After Orca, it became a choice. My trip to the theater helped me to distinguish between loneliness (experienced by default), and solitude (choosing when and how to enjoy my own company), as I began a journey of engaging the world on my own terms. Over the years, that journey deepened as I traveled life's roads with increasing independence and confidence, whether I was attending graduate school at night while working during the day, buying my first house or changing careers. ~ Gina Greenlee

The town of Lunenburg was built on a hill running down to a sheltered harbour. On one of the upper streets stands a Presbyterian church with a huge gilded cod on its weather vane. Along the waterfront, the wooden-shingled houses are brick red, a color that originally came from mixing clay with cod-liver oil to protect the wood against the salt of the waterfront. It is the look of Nova Scotia - brick red wood, dark green pine, charcoal sea. ~ Mark Kurlansky

...because life is too exciting not to share. ~ Dayna Lovely

I went to Africa to work. Finding myself and falling in love were not items on the agenda. Those were the stuff of daydreams, borne of long, icy Canadian winters. At age 30, I felt I already knew my priorities, talents and limitations. The year in Africa forced me to question all of these assumptions. ~ Jacqueline L. Scott

Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits
the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world. ~ Judith Schalansky

As long as you're breathing, it's never too late to reconnect with a long-held love. ~ Gina Greenlee

We - all of us - want to feel special. We want to feel the glory that shines on us when we reach beyond our boundaries to grab at something greater, to live a heroic life, if only for a day or a week or a moment.
This simple yearning is in us all, hardly recognizable, often only the merest hint that there is something more to us.
This is why we seek out new places ... we want to remember a somewhere that gave us the space to expand ourselves, to become a little more of who we truly are. ~ J.E. Leigh

One need not be a rabid Anglican to be extremely sensible to the charm of an English country church ... ~ Henry James

The name Kyirong means "the village of happiness," and it really deserves the name. I shall never cease thinking of this place with yearning, and if I can choose where to pass the evening of my life, it will be in Kyirong. There I would build myself a house of red cedar wood and have one of the rushing mountain streams running through my garden, in which every kind of fruit would grow, for though its altitude is over 9,000 feet, Kyirong lies on the twenty-eighth parallel. When we arrived in January the temperature was just below freezing it seldom falls below -10 degrees Centigrade. The seasons correspond to the Alps, but the vegetation is subtropical. Once can go skiing the whole year round, and in the summer there is a row of 20,000-footers to climb. ~ Heinrich Harrer

No map? No problem. Let commitment and determination lead the way. ~ Gina Greenlee

Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile 'cigarette and sweets' stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway. ~ Jennifer S. Alderson

If a local doesn't have to pay it, there's a way for traveler's to get around it. ~ Russell Hannon

A traveller moves among real people in their own milieu and learns from them, soaking up their wisdom and philosophy, their way of being in the world. A tourist simply hops from one tourist highpoint to another, skimming across the surface, cramming in quantity rather than quality, and comes away with his soul and imagination unchanged, untouched by the wonder of a life lived differently. ~ Roxanne Reid

You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is ... frozen. ~ Pico Iyer

Once I was asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn't know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, 'Tell your daughter three things.'

"Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the world beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They've been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and, to borrow Evan Connell's observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or To the Lighthouse.

"Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write ~ Barry Lopez

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome. ~ Paul Theroux

As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self - the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells - and keep an objective eye on the reader. ~ William Zinsser

It is my hope that this book will help to demystify the origins of travel writing and show that when thousands of travelers follow a guidebook word-for-word, recommendation-for-recommendation, it not only harms contemporary international travel but can also do serious harm to places in developing countries. ~ Thomas Kohnstamm

Find your path in life and travel on it. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Alone, I relished the bird songs, the drone of hushed conversation from neighboring tables, and the gentle lapping of waves sliding on the shore.

I didn't feel the passage of time. There was no destination propelling me forward, no past and no future. Each glorious moment was replaced by the next. ~ Marilyn Berman

But in no epoch has the struggle to find sanctuary in a foreign country been as arduous as in the present day, as countries isolate themselves behind hostility and jealousy (from The House of a Thousand Fortunes / Das Haus der tausend Schicksale, 1937) ~ Stefan Zweig

Putting the dream in motion involved significant personal downsizing, moving three times to trim housing expenses and continuing to freelance. I sold one piece to The New York Times Magazine, many more to The Courant, and another to The St. Petersburg Times. ~ Gina Greenlee

People add color to their story because they think it happened in black and white. ~ Tawny Lara

New insights from being present are a gift. ~ Gina Greenlee

Because travel was an area of my life where I felt most vital, I wanted to continue to invest in that, too. I had quit a full time job, drained my retirement account to invest in a long-held dream, and used the realization of that dream to enter a void with no guarantees. I didn't want financial struggle to be the sole outgrowth of the risks I had taken. More than money, I had put my belief systems on the line. ~ Gina Greenlee

For me they go hand in hand. When I travel it makes me want to write, when I read it makes me want to travel. ~ William Dalrymple

Define your path and travel on this path. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

At chaos' core lies the invitation. ~ Gina Greenlee

Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here ... and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world ... ~ Colin Thubron

I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself. ~ Gerry Abbey

If asked which words one associated with the Sahara, only the most dedicated surrealist might be expected to offer "whale". ~ Eamonn Gearon

Embrace those parts of yourself that you've skillfully avoided until now. That's your true adventure. ~ Gina Greenlee

Your past experiences will flavour your future ones, that is human nature. ~ Deborah Cater

My three favorite travel writers of all time are Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, and Chuck Thompson. Smile When You're Lying not only tells the truth about the travel-writing racket, it gets to the heart of some of the travel industry's best-kept secrets. ~ Kinky Friedman

In 2006 I had begun the discernment process for locating my rightful geographic home. By the time my corporate pink slip arrived I had spent two years researching and taking recon trips to five different cities in southern California. Having crossed them off my list, in February 2008 I visited Sarasota, Florida, at the urging of a friend who winters in a neighboring town. Though Florida had never been on my radar, only minutes in Sarasota I knew I'd found home. ~ Gina Greenlee

No need to queue up; step forward and count yourself in. ~ Gina Greenlee

As we travel to new places we gain new perspectives and renew our thinking. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green. ~ Geoff Dyer

Where the fog is thickest, begin. ~ Marty Rubin

I find, in all the writings of women, a strange muffled quality, as if the living word, as it left the lips, had been hastily suppressed and another substituted, one which would conform to some pattern imposed from without. […] I am trying, from the living urge of my own life, to force open channels of communication so far mostly closed. […] To press out naked into the dark spaces of life is perhaps to build a small part of the path along which others like myself wish to travel. ~ Julie Phillips

I'll tell you what I miss.
I miss that throbbing heart telling me to take a leap when the sky looks too dark.
I miss the walk that I took in the narrow cobblestoned pathways that fumed of history and undying stories of love and loss.
I miss the coffee that scented like mist in a frozen dream in a land of strange beauty.
I miss the afternoon tea that followed my pen to hours of happy melancholy.
I miss the muse I saw dance in a foreign land of near heart.
I miss the stranger smiling at me from a corner and teaching me his language to smile at my twinkled happiness.
I miss that symphony of mad evenings ending in a sky full of stars to fill my soul with an unknown ecstasy.
I miss that hand of an old woman trying to tell me her story.
I miss that child running up to me in a crowd of unknown faces to hand me her candy.
I miss that night where I lay back on a distant balcony gazing at the solitary moon for hours knowing that it is shining at my homeland just as bright.
I miss that stranger listening to my heart and telling me how beautiful it is.
I miss a wandering soul, who went on filling her breath with life of eternal love in the wings of Life.
And I'll tell you now when I look back I see how wonderful Time has treated me and how grateful I am to have lived in moments that roar of a beautiful Life lived with a heart throbbing to take a leap once again in that ocean of Life's beguiling journey. ~ Debatrayee Banerjee