Quotes about travel

She was sick of conversations with people passing through. Nothing you said to each other mattered a damn because you'd never see them again.

Could any technology, no matter how advanced, bridge the awful gulf what lay between the Solar System and the nearest alien sun? Many scientists flatly denied the possibility.

A vocal minority refused to agree. Even if it took centuries to travel from star to star, they contended, this might be no obstacle to sufficiently determined explorers…In any event, why should one assume that all intelligent species were as short-lived as Man? There might be creatures in the universe to whom a thousand-year voyage would present nothing worse than slight boredom.

Bowman had become fascinated by the great explorations of the past — understandably enough, in the circumstances. Sometimes he would cruise with Pytheas out through the Pillars of Hercules, along the coast of a Europe barely emerging from the Stone Age, and venture almost to the chill mists of the Arctic. Or, two thousand years later, he would pursue the Manila galleons with Anson, sail with Cook along the unknown hazards of the Great Barrier Reef, achieve with Magellan the first circumnavigation of the world. And he began to read the Odyssey, which of all books spoke to him most vividly across the gulfs of time.

The allure of travel gradually faded away from my roman. Once upon a time my heart danced just by imaging any of its symbols, a train, a steamship, towns of unknown foreign lands. Nonetheless, my past experiences taught me that travel is no more than the simple "movement of the same thing within the same space." No matter where you go, you find the same kinds of people live, repeating the same kinds of monotonous lives, in the same kinds of villages or towns. In any small town in the countryside, the merchant is fiddling with his abacus at his storefront, looking out at the whitish street all day, the public servant is smoking in his office, thinking about things like vegetables in his lunch box, as they live each tasteless, monotonous day the same way, day after day, watching their lives gradually grow old. The allure of travel came merely to project in my tired heart the image of an endlessly bored landscape like a Chinese parasol tree that grows in some vacant lot, making me feel a tasteless hatred and leeriness for human life in which identical rules repeat themselves no matter where you turn. In short, I lost interest in any kind of travel, the romance of it.

One becomes a philosopher [...] by living among people who are not of his own race and who speak a different language [...] A trip to a Central American jungle to watch how Indians behave near a bridge won't make you see either the jungle or the bridge or the Indians if you believe that the civilization you were born into is the only one that counts. Go and look around with the idea that everything you learned in school and college is wrong.

"It's funny, you know? Distance doesn't matter anymore. It's almost as if geography didn't exist. All you do is doze and float in a pressurised cabin for a while - and it doesn't even matter how long, because time isn't important, either - and before you know it you're in Los Angeles, or London, or Tokyo. Then if you don't happen to like wherever it is you find yourself, you can doze and float again until you find yourself somewhere else."

Writers write about things that other people don't pay much attention to. […] A writer's job is to make the ordinary come alive, […]

When we live in a place for too long, we grow dull. We don't notice what is around us. That is why a trip is so exciting. We are in a new place and see everything in a fresh way.

Now I had crossed it [the Empty Quarter].  To others my journey would have little importance.  It would produce nothing except a rather inaccurate map which no one was ever likely to use.  It was a personal experience, and the reward had been a drink of clean, nearly tasteless water.  I was content with that.

To be static was never wise. Cobwebs clung to walls which stood. Men must journey, for in motion lay the seed, or at least the symbol of progress.

"Traveling has less to do with seeing things than experiencing them...."

"But I'm different now than i was then. Just like I was different at the end of the trip than I'd been at the beginning. And I'll be different tomorrow than I am today. And what that means is that I can never replicate that trip. Even if I went to the same places and met the same people, it wouldn't be the same. My experience wouldn't be the same. To me, that's what traveling should be about. Meeting people, learning to not only appreciate a different culture, but really enjoy it like a local, following whatever impulse strikes you."

The most perilous part of the voyage was the last.