"Riding in a commercial jetliner simply isn't traveling , as far as I'm concerned. It's teleporting from point A to point B. You spend the entire time in the air just waiting to land, and afterward you speak of the flight only if it's to complain about the turbulence or the snoring of the dude...

"Coming back from [a trip overseas] means re-entering a world you have known and lived in, but doing so without feeling the charm you might expect at returning to a former life. You had left that world behind in the hope it might be thoroughly transformed in your absence, but nothing of the sort has...

"Old travelers grumpily complain that travel is now dead and that the world is a suburb. They are quite wrong. Lulled by familiar resemblances between all the unimportant things, they meet the brute differences in everything of importance." --Jonathan Raban, quoted in the introduction to The Best Travel Writing 2010

"There's no point in traveling to another country if all you do when you get there is sit in your hotel room and stare at the television. At the same time, I'm a fierce proponent of sampling a smidgen of TV wherever you go. I assure you the locals are watching the tube, and it's...

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectation of miracles. The above quote from Anais Nin I have found to have great personal application and significance for myself. Reading it again recently it struck me how well the quote suited the life of a vagabonder, or anyone taking a journey. Travel involves taking a leap...

"The question you need to ask travel writers isn't 'where did you go to,' but 'where did you start from.' Observations of abroad often tell you more about the observer and his culture than the people and place he's commenting on." --A.A. Gill, AA Gill is Away (2003)

"Just about every place worth visiting makes a point of promoting a preserved form of its supposedly pure and undiluted cultural past to tourists. Often it involves aboriginal groups: singing and drumming by the Cowichan people on Vancouver Island, for instance, or Maori dancing in body paint and traditional clothes in New Zealand. But you...

"Sun, sea and snow have each become a commodity. This turns travelers by default into consumers of climates and landscapes where they can disport themselves on tame terrain, chattering the while with their mates back home on mobile phones. Horace famously put his finger on the hidden dynamic here: Coelum non animum mutant qui trans...

"The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, the bear witness to the consequences, tragic or comic, of...

"It may sound naive, but when you enter a cross-cultural situation, you are by definition an ambassador for your culture. Decency and pride dictate that we present ourselves well, with respect and integrity. Think of every such cultural encounter as a reciprocal obligation. If you make a promise to return to a village, to send...

"Our culture is our routine of sleeping, bathing, dressing, eating, and getting to work. It is our household chores and the actions we perform on the job; the way we buy goods and services, write and mail a letter, take a taxi or board a bus, make a telephone call, go to a movie, or...

"Walking to ease the mind is an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of the process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing." --Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel (2011)

"The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s...

"Travel into foreign countries is of very great use; not to bring back (as most of our young monsieurs do) an account only of how many paces Santa Rotonda is in circuit; or of the richness of Signora Livia's petticoats; or, as some others, how much Nero's face, in a statue in such an old...

"Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be." I have carried this quote from Shel Silverstein around with me for quite some time. Aside from it being generally inspirational,...

"For as one comes to understand people who live by institutions and values different from one's own, at the same time one comes to see that these people are, nevertheless, at bottom quite like one's own people. The alien culture at first appears to us as a mask, enigmatic or repugnant. On closer acquaintance we...

A 1972 Monty Python sketch called " Travel Agent " contains a classic scene where the Eric Idle character goes on an over-the-top rant about package tourism, at the expense of Michael Palin's travel-agent character. Many of the references are dated now -- and the whole scene is drenched in hyperbole -- but many of...

FOR THE TRAVELER By John O'Donohue from To Bless the Space Between Us (2008) Every time you leave home, Another road takes you Into a world you were never in. New strangers on other paths await. New places that have never seen you Will startle a little at your entry. Old places that know you...

"From childhood I had dreamed of climbing Fujiyama and the Matterhorn, and I had planned to charge Mount Olympus in order to visit the gods that dwelled there. I wanted to swim the Hellespont where Lord Byron swam, float down the Nile in a butterfly boat, make love to a pale Kashmiri maiden beside the...

"If 19th-century travel writing was principally about place -- about filling in the blanks of the map and describing remote places that few had seen -- the best 21st-century travel writing is almost always about people: exploring the extraordinary diversity that still exists in the world beneath the veneer of globalization." --William Dalrymple, from the...