"Here's what I love about travel: Strangers get a chance to amaze you. Sometimes a single day can bring a blooming surprise, a simple kindness that opens a chink in the brittle shell of your heart and makes you a different person when you go to sleep -- more tender, less jaded -- than you...

"Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin have contended that our tendency to judge authenticity in terms of the faithfulness by which traditions are passed intact from one generation to another fails to account for the ways in which traditions actually serve human communities. Traditions, they argue, are invariably defined in the present and reinterpreted to meet...

"In my case, the efforts for these years to live in the dress of the Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely...

"Critics of Western culture blast Coke and Hollywood but not organ transplants and computers. Boosters of Western culture can point to increased efforts to preserve and protect the environment yet they make no mention of some less salubrious aspects of Western culture, such as cigarettes and automobiles, which, even as they are being eagerly adopted...

"As isolated cultures come into closer contact with modern visitors, they naturally become more and more likely to seek modern conveniences for themselves. The more these ethnic enclaves accumulate radios and motorbikes, of course, the less "authentic" they seem to appear -- and thus they become less appealing to tourists. In places like Bali, ethnic...

"Why, who makes much of a miracle? / As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, / Whether I walk the streets if Manhattan, / Or dart my sight over the roofs toward the sky, / Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, / Or...

"The writer Thomas Wolfe said, 'You can't go home again,' but I fear he was wrong. In the world of globalization, you won't be able leave home again." --Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000)

"No one takes a straight-cut line through life. Often we fail to stop at the stations indicated on the timetable. Sometimes we go off the track. Sometimes we lose our way, or take to the air and vanish life chaff. The most tremendous voyages are sometimes taken without moving from the spot. In the space...

" option paralysis : The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none." --Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)

"Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income. This too is meaningless." --Ecclesiastes 5:10

"Look here, I want to say, for godsake fellas get out of themthere machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissakes folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? eh? Take off your shoes...

"'Seeing' as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you." Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (2003)

"The media is based on personality, it's based on celebrity, and it's based on a world that never was. At least to me, most of what is presented as television news is very much like the America that you see at Disney

"The problem is to find an "unspoiled" place. "Unspoiled" does not mean only that a place is left physically intact; it means also that it is not encrusted by the familiar, that it has not been discovered by others.

"But dropping out of touch is still possible. It's so easy. It doesn't take long, just about anywhere, to get away from phones, etc. Five miles outside of any city, usually. In Iceland, which is a prosperous country, a lot of the roads get really sketchy just outside of Reykjavik, and there's still only one...

"The pleasure of travel increases in direct proportion to the decrease of baggage." --Richard Halliburton, Royal Road to Romance (1925)

"O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web / Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech, / Feed the gaping need of my sense, give me ad lib / To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech / For this soul needs to be honored with a new dress woven / From green...

"Returning to a place is one of the little pleasures of travel: you perceive it differently over the years, and it reminds you of who you once were, and often enough the whole experience spills over into a thoroughly pleasant melancholy." --Richard Todd, "Las Vegas, 'Tis of Thee", The Atlantic , February 2001

"You can't ever dream up the perfect travel formula while you're still sitting at home. What seems like paradise when you're planning your travels -- be it white sand beaches, archaeological wonders or exotic textile markets -- will eventually seem somewhat normal after a few weeks or months of living on the road. Moreover, so...