"What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country…we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment...

"By going and coming, a bird weaves its nest." --Ashanti proverb

"Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey." --Henry David Thoreau, " Walking " (1862)

"'Don't go there,' the know-it-all, stay-at-home finger-wagger says of many a distant place. I have heard it my whole traveling life, and in almost every case it was bad advice. In my experience these maligned countries are often the most fulfilling. I am not saying they are fun. For undiluted jollification you bake in the...

"One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own, and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism." --Freya Stark, Riding to the Tigris (1959)

"It was always like that, I knew, when you set out on a long journey; the classic two-week vacation was never enough time to slough off the dead skin of regular life. In some ways, I'd discovered during years of traveling, home life was like an insulating callus you had to wear off before you...

"Traveling with a lover creates a sense of forward momentum where it might not otherwise exist. The relationship adopts the motion of the physical journey, eliminating the risk of boredom and making the travelers complicit. It shows each person in a new, maybe sexier, light. A journey can drive two people apart, as they realize...

"Is there a more compressed and charming religious exhortation than the one in the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus merrily recommends to his disciples, "Be passersby"? Too much fussing about place and home and ritual, and even about where, exactly, you're going to live, is unnecessary: be wanderers, dharma bums." --Adam Gopnik, " What...

"Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experiences -- buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello -- become new all over again." --Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome (2007)

"When you travel, you find yourself Alone in a different way, More attentive now To the self you bring along. Your more subtle eye watching You abroad; and how what meets you Touches that part of the heart That lies low at home: How you unexpectedly attune To the timbre in some voice, Opening in...

"Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life." --Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008)

"Our incessant commentary on others gives insights into the tourist or vacation mode of consumption. "Those other tourists" come to represent a commodified, fragmented tourism. Here we find a model of tourism as consumption, with vacationers moving along the shelves of the tourist supermarket, falling for today's special offers, the well-advertised, the cheap, the easily...

"I saw a crocodile in this part of the Niger, close to the bank; it looked just like a small boat. One day I went down to the river to satisfy a need, and lo, one of the blacks came and stood between me and the river. I was amazed at such a lack of...

"'Getting off the beaten path' is still a negotiation (even if a contrarian one) with the pre-formed idea of a place, rather than with the place itself. And soon enough, it becomes incorporated into the approved, expected experience: witness the advertisements for SUVs and sporting gear that now use that phrase as a slogan. Indeed,...

"So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn’t really give them the idea of the world. Or they don’t read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself. And so anything from the travel stories I tell, that’s...

"I came to the conclusion that some more ascetic reason than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel in peace: to do things for fun smacks of levity, immorality almost, in our utilitarian world. And though personally I think the world is wrong, and I know that in my heart of hearts...

"Travelers continue, in ever larger numbers, to make trips to exotic, non-Western lands, which seem to answer to some of the old stereotypes: that simpler society, where faith is pure, nature pristine, discontent (and its civilization) unknown. But paradise is always being lost. One of the recurrent themes of modern travel narratives is the depredations...

"One says in Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in the Republic: an in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house built round two sides of a garden patio: and of this house, one spot on the deep shady veranda facing inwards to the trees, where there are on an...

"You are simply not lonely enough when you travel with companions… Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen." --Jonathan Raban, Driving Home: An American Journey (2011)

"The United States, as I have before observed, comprehend an immense extent of territory, with a population running from a state of refinement down to one of positive barbarism; and although the Americans travel much, they travel the well beaten paths, in which that which is peculiar is not so likely to meet the eye...