Travelogue Quotes

“A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“I, sometimes, fear that probably I'll just keep changing cities, and may be someday I'll also travel the world, but never find another soul who thinks exactly the way I do.”
― Sanhita Baruah

“Beyond them stood a far greater number of men, all dressed like human versions of classic tin soldiers; dark blue jackets, white shirts, red sashes and black top hats. Definitely not 21st century military uniform; I’d have thought that they were actors had they not, on a drum roll, unshouldered their rifles and fired into the air.”
― Oliver Dowson, There's No Business Like International Business: Business Travel – But Not As You Know It

“I love airports. I’m fascinated by how an airport runs seamlessly as one huge well-oiled machine, and to watch how, when things go wrong, as they do all the time, all those little crises are fixed by people running around like the T-cells of a mammalian immune system dealing with infections before they have chance to get out of control.”
― Oliver Dowson, There's No Business Like International Business: Business Travel – But Not As You Know It

“It’s April 2006. It’s a Saturday. I’m walking through a market in Seoul, Korea, having a very public screaming match with a young Chinese-Korean woman whom I have recently promoted to Asia-Pacific Regional Manager. Despite the promotion, she is not happy. I think she wants my job. Right now, I’d happily give it to her if it would shut her up and calm me down. If I’d wanted a screaming match, I could have stayed at home; no, correct that, I’ve never had a domestic dispute as loud and unpleasant as this is turning out to be.”
― Oliver Dowson, There's No Business Like International Business: Business Travel – But Not As You Know It

“I am trying to get to an airport hotel. I can see it. I know it’s the right hotel because the name is shining out from the top of it in 10-foot-high illuminated letters. It is huge. It is right next to the highway. But there is no exit. I have no idea how to get there or, more pressingly, how to get off this road in the first place. There’s a lot of traffic and, worse, motorcycles with no lights are buzzing past me on the nearside. They all know where they are going and are determined to go there as fast as they can. They have no patience for a foreign visitor searching for an exit. This is no time to learn to drive all over again.”
― Oliver Dowson, There's No Business Like International Business: Business Travel – But Not As You Know It

“This (San Francisco) is the most beautiful city in America, Probably because it looks nothing like America”
― Ilya Ilf, Yevgeni Petrov

“A Spaniard and a Pole worked in the barbershop where we got our hair cut. An Italian shined our shoes. A Croat washed our car. This was America.”
― Ilya Ilf, Yevgeni Petrov

“Rule #1 of Traveling-
Don't even think of answering questions that contain the word "plan"?”
― Sanhita Baruah

“Clearly it's not all that pacific on the Pacific Ocean”
― Ilya Ilf, Yevgeni Petrov

“All our ancestors were murdered, murderers, complicit to murder, or combating murder.”
― Lucy Knisley, An Age of License: A Travelogue

“মানুষ যত সহজে ধ্বংস করতে শিখেছে তত সহজে নির্মাণ করতে শিখেনি ।”
― Annada Shankar Ray, পথে প্রবাসে

“At about eight-thirty or nine the friends make a halt, already in sight of Moranchel. Moranchel is on the left of the Cifuentes road, at some two hundred paces from the highway. It is a gloomy, dark town that seems to have no business being surrounded by green fields. The old man sits down in the ditch and the traveler lies on his back and looks up at some little clouds, graceful as doves, which are floating in the sky. A stork flies past, not very high, with a snake in its beak. Some partridge fly up from a bed of thyme. An adolescent goatherd and a member of his flock are sinning one of the oldest of sins in the shade of a hawthorn tree blooming with tiny sweet-smelling flowers, white as orange blossoms. ― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels Through the Spanish Countryside”
― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels through the Spanish Countryside

“...it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map.¨”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“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, Notes of a Naive Traveler: Nepal and Thailand

“Banyak hal yang dapat dipelajari di jalan dan tidak pernah diajarkan di sekolah formal manapun. Traveling adalah tentang pelajaran hidup untuk membuka mata mengamati dari perspektif yang berbeda, melihat dari sudut pandang yang bukan biasa digunakan.”
― Heri Sugiarto, Overland - Dari Negeri Singa ke Daratan Cina Jilid 1

“Perhaps there is to be found in Pastrana the key to something which happens in Spain more frequently than is necessary. Past splendor overwhelms and in the end exhausts the people's will; and without force of will, as can be seen in so many cases, by being exclusively occupied with the contemplation of the glories of the past, they leave current problems unsolved. When the belly is empty and the mind filled with golden memories, the golden memories continually retreat and at last, though no one goes so far as to admit it, there is even doubt whether they ever existed and there is nothing left of them but a benevolent and useless cultural residue.”
― Camilo José Cela

“Inwardly - nobody knows why - the passengers on one train always envy slightly the passengers on another train; it is something that's true but a little difficult to explain. Maybe it's because, even though they don't realize it very clearly, a third-class passenger would always be glad to change places with another, even if the other were third-class too. ― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels Through the Spanish Countryside”
― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels through the Spanish Countryside

“I ended up in the back seat of a chicken truck’s cab heading through beautiful scenery and disastrous roads to my hotel. About an hour later, we stopped to sell a few hundred of the chickens to a butcher shop.”
― Jennifer S. Alderson, Notes of a Naive Traveler: Nepal and Thailand

“Alone wasn’t just a closed dark room anymore but a whole wide world full of opportunities. I needed to explore and occupy the vastness of the world inside of me, which until now I hadn’t truly understood.”
― Neha Bindal, Table for One

“Bersama siapapun kita berpetualang, traveling adalah salah satu sekolah dengan guru terbaik untuk menjadikan diri kita tumbuh menjadi manusia yang lebih baik.”
― Heri Sugiarto, Overland - Dari Negeri Singa ke Daratan Cina Jilid 1

“A PET scan of his brain activity showed diminished capacity on the left side of his brain, hence, planning ahead, strategic thinking is harmed. A positive is that he is less critical of things. He has lost language and gained singing... THAT makes for more fun.
What amazes me is that so many times he returns and talks and seems to think like he used to. His voice and laugh returns to normal. How can that be???”
― Susan Straley, Alzheimer's Trippin' with George: Diagnosis to Discovery in 10,000 Miles

“Today we traveled back south toward Portland, Oregon. It occurred to me that we were now going toward our home in Florida instead of away from it.
Maybe this concept was why I was feeling unenthusiastic and worn out.”
― Susan Straley, Alzheimer's Trippin' with George: Diagnosis to Discovery in 10,000 Miles

“The fascination of the July Monarchy public with lithographic albums was intimately related to the popularity of the travelogue, which constituted an important literary form at the time. Professional travelers and scientists as well as many of the major writers of the period dedicated themselves to this genre. Stendhal’s Promenades dans Rome (1829) and his Memoires d'un touriste (1838); Alphonse de Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient (1832-1833); Victor Hugo’s Rhin (1842); George Sand’s Lettres d'un voyageur (1834-1836); Theophile Gautier’s Tour en Belgique (1836) and his Tra los Montes (1843); and Alexandre Dumas’s Quinze jours au Sinai are some of the outstanding examples of the travelogues published in the 1830s and 1840s.”
― Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848

“When finally we turned to leave, the old babushkas and the children alike did not know whether to laugh or cry, and so most did both."
❤️❤️
Tim Cope: On the Trails of Genghis Khan”
― Tim Cope:

“Now, I was unemployed in Beijing, and my former ambition seemed like the pollution that smudged the sky, a great green cloud composed of a billion different particles of fear and uncertainty. Without a career I hardly knew who I was anymore.”
― Ann Mah, Mastering the Art of French Eating: Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever, and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I love wide stretches of open land, but to the average Spaniard, who typically thrives in company and is most at home in a crowd, these fields of Extremadura (which literally means “extremely tough”) could even be intimidating, only partly because not far back in time there were bandits in the region.

They were named as the ‘extreme’ end of the country.

If it is at least not totally empty, there is certainly a sense of that great lonesome feeling created by the far-off, long, long line at which the earth's surface and the sky meet: a pleasant melancholy of an imagined solitary truck crawling across a plain, the ancestral memory of a caravan trail or a child’s drawing of a single emblematic tree on a small hill.”
― Brett Hetherington, Slow Travels in Unsung Spain

“I kissed him, throwing my arms around his neck. I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t hold back my love. I wanted him with every part of my being. His energy pulled me down to earth and sent my legs growing into the ground like the roots of a tree. He spoke about us having 'vibes' and tried to explain it to me as though I wouldn’t know what he was talking about, like I didn’t know the language of souls, like I hadn’t noticed that when we sat next to each other the air buzzed between us.”
― Dana Da Silva, The Shift: A Memoir

“I chose to trust him when he said that the sharks were like the “dogs of the sea” and took aim, plunging into a shark-less patch of ocean. The water stole all my senses in a second, then a tail called them to attention, whipping my legs as I surfaced among the bubbles, my heart pounding.”
― Dana Da Silva, The Shift: A Memoir