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
Invention in travel accords with Jorge Luis Borges's view, floated beautifully through his poem "Happiness" (
La Dicha
), that in our encounters with the world, "everything happens for the first time" Just as "whoever embraces a woman is Adam," and "whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire,"anyone's first view of the Sphinx sees it new: "In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted ... Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal."—
DSS
Traveling is one of the saddest pleasures of life.
—Madame de Staël,
Corinne, ou l'Italie
(1807)
Two Paradoxes of Travel
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
—Carson McCullers, "Look Homeward, Americans,"
Vogue
(1940)
To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.
—Vladimir Nabokov,
Lectures on Russian Literature
(1982)
Solitary Travel
Solitary Travelers: Neither sleepy nor deaf men are fit to travel quite alone. It is remarkable how often the qualities of wakefulness and watchfulness stand every party in good stead.
—Sir Francis Galton,
The Art of Travel
(1855)
Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non sequiturs, shattering your concentration with "Oh, look, it's raining" and "You see a lot of trees here.
"
It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in your private mood to be special and worthy of interest.—
OPE
In the best travel, disconnection is a necessity. Concentrate on where you are; do no back-home business; take no assignments; remain incommunicado; be scarce. It is a good thing that people don't know where you are or how to find you. Keep in mind the country you are in. That's the theory.—
GTES
Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.—
OPE
The whole point of traveling is to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but
by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people didn't see many strangers and were hospitable and do not instantly think of you as money on two legs. Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans is a liberating event. It can be a solemn occasion for discovery, or more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet.—
GTES
In the best travel books the word "alone" is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark. The conceit of this, the idea of being able to report it—for I had deliberately set out to write a book, hadn't I?—made up for the discomfort. Alone, alone: it was like proof of my success. I had had to travel very far to arrive at this solitary condition.—
OPE
There was no concept of solitariness among the Pacific islanders I traveled among that did not also imply misery or mental decline. Reading as a recreation was not indulged in much on these islands either—for that same reason, because you did it alone. Illiteracy had nothing to do with it, and there were plenty of schools. They knew from experience that a person who cut himself off, who was frequently seen alone—reading books, away from the hut, walking on the beach, on his own—was sunk in
musu,
the condition of deep melancholy, and was either contemplating murder or suicide, probably both.—
HIO
All travelers are like aging women, now homely beauties; the strange land flirts, then jilts and makes a fool of the stranger. There was no hell like a stranger's Sunday.—
WE
Anonymity in Travel
On the days when I did not speak to anyone I felt I had lost thirty pounds, and if I did not talk for two days in a row I had the alarming impression that I was about to vanish. Silence made me
feel invisible. Yet to be anonymous and traveling in an interesting place is an intoxication.—
KBS
Being invisible—the usual condition of the older traveler, is much more useful than being obvious.—
GTES
The temporariness of travel often intensifies friendship and turns it into intimacy. But this is fatal for someone with a train to catch. I could handle strangers, but friends required attention and made me feel conspicuous. It was easier to travel in solitary anonymity, twirling my mustache, puffing my pipe, shipping out of town at dawn.—