"The accepted snobbery is that the world was great until we all started going to have a look at it as traveler, tourists and refugees. Travel writing is also part of the illusion of global familiarity, the constant stream of images from over there that flood through the media combined with air travel, telephones, faxes,...

"For the past three decades, travel -- especially when it gets written down -- often has at its center a defining solipsism: the Self in search of itself in strange places promising to cast a different and edifying light on the Quest. In an era of self-absorption and self-gratification -- Facebook and Twitter may be...

"Walking is a way of remaining in place, or in a place, of leaving oneself to return to oneself, of upping the odds that surprise might flow through. Of giving one's eyes something to do, so that the world might be heard." --Peter Cole, "Jerusalem," Poetry , November 2009

It's not a likely scenario, but it is one that provides food for thought of our dependance on these hydrocarbon-burning aluminum tubes that we pack ourselves into like sardines to get from point A to point B as fast as possible, placing our faith in well-maintained aircraft, pilot training, physics, and luck. The eruption of...

"[International travel] is very important not only for individuals but also for the country as a whole. The U.S. has periodically made policy blunders because we tend not to appreciate the way our country is seen by foreigners; we often fail to understand the prism of suspicion through which any American action is perceived by...

"But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I've come to understanding happiness). Not having...

"Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know,...

"The practice of soulful travel is to discover the overlapping point between history and everyday life, the way to find the essence of every place, every day: in the markets, small chapels, out-of-the-way parks, craft shops. Curiosity about the extraordinary in the ordinary moves the heart of the traveler intent on seeing behind the veil...

"There ain't much time left, you're born out of this insane abyss and you're going to fall back into it, so while you're alive you might as well show your bare ass." --Jim Carroll, in a Musician, Player and Listener interview, February 1981

"The habituation of workers to the assembly line was made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has argued, through the installment plan previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment became...

"Travel writing isn't really an exploration of where you've been, so much as an explanation of where you've come from. All journeys end up at the same address. Back home. Travelers don't write for the people they visit, but for the people they've left behind." --A.A. Gill, AA Gill is Away (2002)

"Pilgrimage seems to be a means of reinforcing certainties of faith. Independent travel can be about challenging one's idea of living." --Rory MacLean, Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail From Istanbul to India (2006)

"The best kind of travel involves a particular state of mind, in which one is not merely open to the occurrence of the unexpected, but to deep involvement in the unexpected, indeed, open to the possibility of having one's life changed forever by a chance encounter." --Elisabeth Eaves, " Wanderlust ," World Hum , Feb....

"We all go through a similar process of being formed by the culture around us. It is something described well in Bruce Wexler’s book Brain and Culture: Neuroscience, Ideology and Social Change , in which Wexler argues that much of human conflict arises from our efforts to reconcile the world as we believe it to...

"When we accept uncritically what others counsel us, the path they prescribe for us, we risk losing for naught the one thing we possess in inevitable yet mysterious finitude: time, the numbered days of our lives." --Jeffrey Tayler, " Insanity and the Traveling Life ," World Hum, Jan. 21, 2009

"The writer and commentator Viktor Yerofeyev said he had noticed that the more Russians traveled, the more they tended to lose some of the coarseness that at times characterized Soviet society. “Through all this travel, we are seeing a change in mentality at home,” Mr. Yerofeyev said. “People are now seeking pleasure, whether it is...

"The sentimental tourist makes images in advance; they grow up in his mind by a logic of their own. He finds himself thinking of an unknown, unseen place, as having such and such a shape and figure rather than such another. It assumed in his mind a certain complexion, a certain color which frequently turns...

"My own policy is to try to be as non-judgmental about another culture as I can while I'm there. You know, "when in Rome..." and all that. But I'm not a complete relativist either. Aldous Huxley once said that when one is living in a developed secular country, one longs to live in a spiritual...

"Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place." --Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988)

"Romantic travel was in its last great age. The tradition of the Grand Tour, though waning, was not yet spent. The cities and monuments of Europe still stood in their anointed places. Space had not yet been annihilated by engines, wires, wireless, and air flight. The sanctity of time and tradition still blessed the holy...