Tourists Quotes

“أنتِ تحبين مصر تماماً كما تحبين عرضاً طريفاً فى السيرك أو حيواناً نادراً فى حديقة الحيوان.لكن صدقينى.أن تولدى مصرية,فهذه مأساة!!”
― علاء الأسواني, نيران صديقة

“In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

“TO BE A TOURIST is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walked around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysentric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

“David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don’t understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

“None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion.

He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.

The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.”
― Diane Johnson

“In any case, a little danger is a small price to pay for ridding a place of tourists.”
― Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines

“Most tourists see way less of the places they visit than their cameras.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Traveling is not only the art of getting lost, but true travelers, in a sense, never return home. If they do return, they never see home the same way they did before leaving. They begin to see the foreignness of home after experiencing being at home in other foreign lands.
Traveling, I have learned, is not all about the touristy and the beautiful places as we see them in tourist guides. Traveling can be frightening in many ways, most important of which is the realization of how much sadness, pain, impoverishment, and despair exist next to, behind, under, over, and above the mountains, the blue lakes, the pristine beaches, the highly rated hotels and restaurants, the well-designed museums and historic and cultural sites, the fancy shops that, in many places, most locals can neither access nor afford. There are places so sad that the fanciest building one can see there is the airport! There are other places where the airports are run down and depressing, but once you step out of the airport, you discover that such places are full of life, meaning, and physical and spiritual nourishment. There are countries, namely the developed countries, where everything looks shiny and perfect, yet as soon as you enter, you encounter so much loneliness, depression, hate, racism, and lifelessness. Things are never as they appear at first glance. Traveling leaves us with more questions than answers – it is so bittersweet."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“It was generally agreed that they were a funny bunch, these natives of August.”
― Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence

“She knew everything about everyone, not just permanent residents but also the summer people, whom she called "wash ashores.”
― Karen Dukess (The Last Book Party)

“The castle, as was to be expected, was overcrowded. Lots of stupid fucking people with their stupid fucking children, all of them taking stupid fucking pictures of stupid fucking things, preferring to watch reality through the stupid fucking screens of their stupid fucking phones, instead of experiencing it with their goddamned eyes, the stupid motherfuckers!”
― Keijo Kangur, I Hate Traveling

“Come on, I want to take you around to the back, to see St. Anthony's Garden," he said.
Delicate bell clangs marked the half hour, and a mockingbird called through the still air as the group entered the garden. The green space was dominated by the tall white statue of a man with arms raised in welcome.
"St. Anthony is known as the protector of childless women and finder of lost things," explained Falkner. "This area has had many functions over the years. It was a place for gatherings, markets, meals---even a dueling ground. Père Antoine, one of the cathedral's popular pastors, used the space as a kitchen garden to feed his monks. He also worked with voodoo priestess Marie Laveau to assist the large slave population, especially women and children."
"A Roman Catholic priest collaborating with a voodoo priestess?" asked one of the tourists, mopping his brow with a handkerchief.
Falkner nodded. "They had more in common than you may think. They both had a desire to heal, sooth, and do good works. They were both very spiritual people. Marie Laveau blended voodoo with Catholicism, especially regarding the saints.”
― Mary Jane Clark, That Old Black Magic

“I can’t help sharing a pattern I have observed about tourists: they often come across as not only individuals who weren’t profoundly altered by their travel experiences, but also, in many cases, I find them to be more narrow-minded and sticking to their old beliefs and values, as if what they already know is and remains the only truth in the universe. Many encounters with tourists have proven to me that … travel is a way to confirm their biases and worldviews rather than challenge, expand, disrupt, and turn their worlds upside down. It is like people who only watch TV news channels or read books that confirm their prejudices and beliefs of being from the ‘best, most wonderful, most civilized country in the world,’ or such nonsense.
This perhaps explains why the perspective and worldview of many tourists not only are not expanded after traveling, but their perspective is arguably narrowed further after touring other countries.”

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“There is something sad about traveling, because as you discover the enormous amount of life and living that exist in all these places and hidden corners, you are left with two contradictory feelings: first, traveling strongly confirms the idea that one can only see what one is intellectually, spiritually, and physically prepared to see…Everything we encounter depends on our palate in the same way tasting food is that encounter between the food and the palate. Second, there is something excruciatingly painful about leaving a place as soon as you begin to feel at home. There is a deep sorrow in knowing that all the things, places, lakes, wildflowers, animals, and people that we encounter will continue their lives without us. Even more painful is the realization that there are many more lives and much more beauty that we will never get to experience."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“Is it fair to say that traveling is life itself? It is like seeing endless beauty, pain, desolation, beautiful hearts and minds, and nature through the windows of a fast-moving train where everything is fleeting and impossible to capture."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“Las Vegas may have residents and not merely tourists, but it does not want to welcome you. You are swallowed. Maybe it will hack up your hair and bones later, but the oddsmakers are not on your side.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Holidays with Bigfoot

“As the afternoon slips into evening, the guests drift away from the beach. They spend the hours before dinner recovering from the day - the sun, the heat, the booze, beauty so vivid their eyes crave a rest from it. They shower. They check in with the office. (Their expertise is needed to resolve some particularly thorny issue, and they provide the solution with relief; or they are told to enjoy their vacation, things are chugging along just fine without them, and for the rest of the evening they are cranky and short-tempered.)”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“Au contraire, and because I said that, that makes me French, unlike the Englishman at a Paris auction house who raised his '3' paddle after a Frenchman yelled, 'I bid you adieu.”
― J.S. Mason, The Ghost Therapist...And Other Grand Delights

“Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“A tourist is someone who visits places within their heart.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Tourists take pictures to prove they were there. Filmmakers make movies because they were never there.”
― Laurie Anderson

“Many people were rendered homeless in the August 2023 Maui wildfires.”
― Steven Magee

“I expect Hawaii summer vacations will end soon, as tourists will not like the excessive heat that climate change is creating in the Hawaiian islands.”
― Steven Magee

“We're on our way to the Grand Canyon!" the woman said. She used big gestures and smiled too wide in her "I Heart Albuquerque" tank top. She was clearly a morning person.
"Oh, that's cool!" Miranda said, equally as cheery. "We're from Arizona. You're going to love it; it's beautiful there."
"That's what we've heard!" She leaned down, pressing both of her hands into the table. "And we paid for the tour into the Canyon. We're going to go down into it and see real, live Indians!"
Miranda immediately began to laugh. She bent over her plate of muffins, body shaking and eyes squeezed shut. The woman's face was blank, then slowly morphed into offended confusion. Her hands were still pressed into the table, and she turned her full attention toward me; now her posture looked more like a cop conducting an interrogation. She said nothing but her face shouted, 'What's so funny?'
"She's laughing because I'm actually Native American," I said. I resisted the urge to do jazz hands at this woman, and instead offered up whatever a fake smile looks like at too-damn-early in the morning.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“Tourists only see what they go to see. In a strange sense, tourists may miss seeing everything except what they go to see.”

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“There is so much life on the sides, the margins, in dark alleys, in parks, and remote villages that most tourists never get to see, and thus never get to feel and capture the real spirit of the places they visit. And thus, Dear Readers, I ask: can we travel without being tourists? Indeed, can we stop being tourists altogether? Can we begin to master the art of getting lost; the art of finding hidden gems, beauty, or simple experiences after which life is never the same? "

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“Going farther is not enough – what matters is the extent to which we master the art of seeing, knowing, and sensing the world as we go farther. Perhaps only travelers who know how to get lost and even be vulnerable can get close to seeing?"

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“We learn from traveling that it makes a huge difference to simply acknowledge and greet each other; to ask whenever possible or appropriate, whether someone is alright; and most importantly to foil the plans and intentions of fear and warmongers using every medium and platform to get us to distrust, hate, and be afraid of each other, or to beware of strangers."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako