"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that...

"Tyrants never like their subjects to travel: as long as there are no grounds of comparison, there is no basis from which to challenge the existing order. Anything that provides images of a different way of life poses a potential threat. The banning of travel goes hand in hand with the banning of books and...

"To stop being a tourist, sometimes all you have to do is start standing still." --Taras Grescoe, End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists (2003)

"Vagabonding is not like bulk shopping: The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow, nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries." --Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (2003)

"There are deeper reasons to travel -- itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing there." --Jeff Greenwald, Shopping for Buddhas (1990)

"If every journey makes us wiser about the world, it also returns us to a sort of childhood. In alien parts, we speak more simply, in our own or some other language, more freely, unencumbered by the histories that we carry around at home, and look more excitedly, with eyes of wonder." --Pico Iyer, Video...

"I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will / not run to that easy victory: / still around the looser, wider forces at work: / I will try / to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening / scope, but enjoying the freedom that / Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality...

"Boredom greases the cogs in the machinery of marvels. Oh, God, will you be bored. The three days waiting for an Indonesian bureaucrat to issue you a travel permit; the rock slide in Costa Rica that caused a twenty-three-hour traffic jam; the five-day wait for the Congo River passenger barge; the eight sweaty hours spent...

"Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also -- for better or worse -- takes us out of our class context, so that the color and flavor of certain places cannot...

"A foreigner tends to see paradise where a native sees purgatory, insofar as a foreigner is in a privileged position and has more appreciative eyes, undimmed by familiarity." --Pico Iyer, from a Powells.com interview, 2000

"Are we correct that all cultural values are being destroyed? Or are they once again changing, under the press of circumstance and from their own internal dynamics, while we, the anthropologists, disapprove of the changes or at least do not comprehend them? To argue globally against cultural change is a startling position; to accept all...

"To academics and freelance philosophers who theorize about the difficulty of achieving authenticity in the postmodern world, the souvenir T-shirt is seen as the ultimate defilement. To wear one means you had the money to see the sights of the world, but not enough wit to do anything other than stare vacantly at them and...

"We attribute much to chance meetings, refer to them as turning points in our life, but these encounters could never have occurred had we not made ourselves ready for them. If we possessed more awareness, these fortuitous encounters would yield still greater rewards. It is only at certain unpredictable times that we are fully attuned,...

"Exploration is not so much a covering of surface distance as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape or a remark overhead may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning." --Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955)

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." --Andre Gide

"Nowadays it costs more and takes greater ingenuity, imagination, and enterprise to fabricate travel risks than it once required to avoid them. Almost as much effort goes into designing the adventure as into surviving it. For this the tourist millions have not the time or the money. Travel adventure today thus inevitably acquires a factitious,...

"Back home in the Wild West, time whips by with the relentless and terrible purpose of a strangling vine filmed in fast motion. A week, two months, ten years snap past like amnesia, a continual barrage of workdays, appointments, dinner dates and laundromats, television shows and videocassettes, parking meters, paydays and phone calls. You can...

"When our spirits lift at the start of a journey, there is usually an element of relief to be leaving things behind. Travel releases us from the treadmill of domestic habit. Even if it goes no further than our choice of clothes, there is an impulse of defiance." --Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates (2001)

"The luxury traveler and his poorer cousin, the common tourist, are constantly encased in gleaming metals and other costly materials; preened mechanically by resentful lackeys; surfeited with overpriced, denutrified victuals; treated to vulgar and expensive entertainments; intentionally or unintentionally lied to; sneered at even by themselves; led like sheep through attractions that bore them? This...

"Constantly I see my students leaving the university, determined to do not what they want and need to do, but what their parents and their friends believe that they ought to do. And in this they can in some measure succeed. Society has a great span of resources to assist someone in doing what he's...