Vagablogging :: Rolf Potts Vagabonding Blog » Travel Quote of the Day

Our generation is not the first to have its travels disrupted by telecommunications

Rolf Potts — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:00:11 +0000

“Pierpont Morgan himself, though he traveled frequently to distract mind and body at doctors’ orders, was burdened intolerably by the tasks he had undertaken. …Traveling through Egypt in a resplendent private car, a companion of his noted how, at the receipt of cablegrams from New York, he would be plunged in long glowering calculations, hours upon end, while the incredible, half-ruined pyramids of other emperors and other ages which he had come to gaze at drifted by his window unnoticed.”
–Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (1962)

Lawrence Wright on the pleasure of reading on trains

Rolf Potts — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:00:42 +0000

“I don’t know why it is so much more pleasurable to read a book on a train coach than in an armchair at home. There must be a parallel between one’s life and one’s book, each of them pleasingly held in suspense as they roll through possibilities. The be in that parenthetical state between Point A and Point B, and Chapter One and The End, is to be in a state of hammocky contentment, and to arrive at the destinations simultaneously is, for me, a nearly orgasmic form of melancholy.”
–Lawrence Wright, In the New World (1988)

James Hamilton-Paterson on the standardization of travel

Rolf Potts — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:00:54 +0000

“One plausible distinction between travel and tourism is that the traveler makes his or her own way, whereas tourists’ paths have been beaten into submission long before they go, whether singly or as a group. The elision between the two types has often been a consequence of pocket guides. In the nineteenth century the Thorough Guides and Baedeker’s made it easy for the less intrepid to plan in advance, to know where they might stay, what to see, what to expect. The information acted as insulation against the threat of too much raw reality. In our day the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides have simply done for the demotic mass what the earlier guides did for the middle classes, now greatly aided by the huge expansion of cheap air travel in the last twenty-five years. The whole experience of dashing about the planet has become commonplace and increasingly standardized.”
–James Hamilton-Paterson, “The End of Travel,” Granta #94 (2006)

There is wisdom in turning to the unfamiliar

Rolf Potts — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 04:00:21 +0000

“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”
–George Santayana, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays (1968)

Most travelers hurry too much

Rolf Potts — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:00:58 +0000

“Most travelers hurry too much…the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly — but with real inward attention. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you’ll be there.”
–Lawrence Durrell, “Spirit of Place,” quoted in The New New Journalism (2005)

Marian Botsford Fraser on the post-colonial journey

Rolf Potts — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:00:34 +0000

“The heroic is no longer compelling. There are few places under the sun that cannot be found with the help of global positioning technology. Almost anyone can get to the top of a remote glacier and send a photo home via satellite phone. Travel, and travel literature, used to be about being the first person to do or see something; it is increasingly about being the last to chronicle a shrinking wilderness or witness a creature facing extinction. And in a world in which exodus and exile are the journeys that matter — Zimbabweans swimming across the Limpopo to South Africa, Somalis fleeing to Yemen, Burmese refugee camps in the borderlands of Thailand — the great white perspective on the exotic seems irrelevant, even insulting.”
–Marian Botsford Fraser, “Post-Colonial Journeys,” The Walrus, Summer 2008

Seth Stevenson on the forgotten benefit of overland travel

Rolf Potts — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:00:47 +0000

“We’ve forgotten the benefit of surface travel: It forces you to understand, deep in your bones, the distance you’ve covered; and it gradually eases you into a new context that exists not only outside your body, but inside your head.”
–Seth Stevenson, Grounded (2010)

Don’t squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of

Rolf Potts — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:00:31 +0000

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”
–Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, June 1746

Travel can be a way of synthesizing dreams with reality

Rolf Potts — Mon, 31 May 2010 04:00:10 +0000

“Travel is mostly about dreams — dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting suspicious people, living in a hostile place, testing your adaptability, hoping for some sort of revelation.”
–Paul Theroux, “Taking the Great American Roadtrip,” Smithsonian, September 2009

Much of the way of we think, feel and act is a result of cultural upbringing

Rolf Potts — Tue, 25 May 2010 10:00:46 +0000

“An American asked why he calls the brothers of his parents and the husbands of his parents’ sisters by the same kinship term, is likely to reply, ‘Because they are all uncles,’ or he may ask, ‘What else could you call them?’ Were he asked why he doesn’t eat fruit salad or ice cream and cake for breakfast, his reply would likely be, that they wouldn’t be good, or that nobody does it, or that they aren’t suitable breakfast food. It is doubtful if he could make a Greenland Eskimo or a South Sea Islander understand how cold fruit juice, fresh fruits, boiled eggs, cereals with cream and sugar, or waffles with honey are particularly different from fruit salad, ice cream, and cake. If it isn’t the cold or the sweet, the fruit or the eggs, the cream or the flour — all of which we find acceptable for breakfast in other forms — then what is it? The simple fact is that people usually think, feel, and act as they do because they were brought up in a culture in which these ways were accepted, not only as good and right, but as natural.”
–Ina Corinne Brown, Understanding Other Cultures (1963)