Travel Writing 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

“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, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“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

“It doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.”
― Pico Iyer

“Buccal list: A list of food a person has never tried before but wants to taste during their lifetime.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.”
― Paul Theroux

“It's temples and palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to heaven.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation

“All night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly--not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things the outer limits would suffice.”
― Ernesto Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“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, The Best American Travel Writing 2008

“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, The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca

“Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Labels

“...what I'm getting at is like the distinction between tourist and a traveler. The tourist experience is superficial and glancing. The traveler develops a deeper connection with her surroundings. She is more invested in them -- the traveler stays longer, makes her own plans, chooses her own destination, and usually travels alone: solo travel and solo participation, although the most difficult emotionally, seem the most likely to produce a good story.”
― Ted Conover

“...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, The Cat's Table

“Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-turned profile of a bar band and its music. A well-grounded sense of place is the challenge for the writer. We observe, we calculate, we inquire, we look for a link between what we already know and what we're about to learn. The finest travel writing describes what's going on when nobody's looking.”
― Tom Miller

“If asked which words one associated with the Sahara, only the most dedicated surrealist might be expected to offer "whale".”
― Eamonn Gearon, The Sahara: A Cultural History

“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 Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“What is a miracle if not the manifestation of light where darkness is expected?”
― Leigh Ann Henion, Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World

“Never be afraid to travel on a new path.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“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, See Before You Die: Costa Rica

“Un secret est d’autant plus lourd à porter qu’il engage votre amour.”
― Olivier Weber, Le Barbaresque

“There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient

“No camera, no recording device, no laptop, none of this palm pilot nonsense or a cell phone. Paper and pencil, a book, maybe a bilingual dictionary. Anything beyond that (a) can be stolen, and (b) intimidates people you encounter. The more double-A batteries you carry, the more you distance yourself from the people you're writing about.”
― Tom Miller

“Il n’est pire exil que celui du coeur”
― Olivier Weber, Le Barbaresque

“La gloire, c'est comme la gouache, ça prend très vite puis ça part à la première goutte de pluie.”
― Olivier Weber

“Deferring judgement to a later date resolves nothing and all you are left with is a box of jumbled slides and a collection of knick-knacks and odds and ends. Here a face. There a sunset.”
― Will Ferguson, Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan

“Nous sommes tous des naufragés de l'âme vois-tu, la peinture n'est que le reflet de ce chagrin, antichambre de la grande joie à venir."
Nous sommes tous des naufragés de l'âme vois-tu, la peinture n'est que le reflet de ce chagrin, antichambre de la grande joie à venir.
On ne se tue pas pour une femme (Plon)”
― Olivier Weber

“Finally, after a glance at Notre Dame and a brisk trot through the Louvre, we sat down at a cafe on the Place de l'Opera and watched the people. They were amazing -- never had we seen such costumes, such make-up, such wigs; and, strangest of all, the wearers didn't seem in the least conscious of how funny they looked. Many of them even stared at us and smiled, as though we had been the oddities, and not they. Mr. Holmes no doubt found it amusing to see the pageant of prostitution, poverty and fashion reflected in our callow faces and wide-open eyes.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“In this travel guide, you will discover some very useful and interesting information: the result of our investigations while visiting one of the must-go to places in the world – the Republic of Maldives.”
― Sahara Sanders, MALDIVES... THE PARADISE

“A trip to the Maldivian Isles was an adventurous, though stressful—while still totally amazing—vacation which I described in much detail in the travel guide “Maldives… The Paradise” readers can find at major book retailers.”
― Sahara Sanders

“Life's a journey to be traversed circumspectly! Live, pray, love, serve, work and travel; all with a will; for the clock of your life may next be still”
― Henrietta Newton Martin, Senior Legal Counsel & Author - The Greatest of All Romances- Your Potter’s