Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love , which takes readers on a spiritual journey from Italy to India to Bali, was far and away the most popular travel memoir of 2006. Before long it will be made into a movie starring Julia Roberts. At her website , Gilbert gives some perspectives on mindful travel that share...

"It is one of the seductions of travel that it allows us to enjoy the extremes of human emotion and experience in the knowledge that next morning we shall wake in a different place, having left them behind. In the normal way of things, sex, death and religion may be fascinating but they are also...

"It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially molded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others. They may have particular visions of who we are and hence may subtly prevent certain sides of us from emerging… Being...

"That is the charm of a map. It represents the other side of the horizon where everything is possible. It has the magic of anticipation without the toil and sweat of realization. The greatest romance ever written pales before the possibilities of adventure that lie in the faint blue trails from sea to sea. The...

"I think to write about jetlag is a way of saying that if you write about travel you're writing about displacement and shock and confusion, and "measure travel inwards", as Thoreau said. And it's a way of saying also that just as magic realism has so enlightened and emancipated our fiction, some of the mechanisms...

"We do these things not to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping us" --Catch-phrase; taken from a 2005 reader email

"You buy furniture. You tell yourself this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple of years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes....

"When I was very young a big financier once asked me what I would like to do, and I said, 'To travel.' 'Ah,' he said, 'it is very expensive; one must have a lot of money to do that.' He was wrong. For there are two kinds of travelers; the Comfortable Voyager, round whom a...

"Vagabonding is not just moving over the Earth from one place to another in some kind of conveyance. It's not about where you're going, or how you're getting there, or even about getting away from it all. Vagabonds may be male or female, young or old, well-heeled or broke, hip or straight, of any color...

"When people ask me what they should do to become a writer, I seldom mention books. I assume the person has a love for the written word, and solitude, and a disdain for wealth -- so I say, 'You want to be a writer? First leave home.'" --Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend (2000)

"Travel writers are seldom scholars. They are, by inclination if not definition, transients and dilettantes. All that can save the travel writer and redeem his or her often inexpert perceptions of foreign people and places is curiosity, a willingness to be uncertain, an essential emotional generosity, and an ability to write. Even travel writers well...

"Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a...

"Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits." --Pico Iyer, from "A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World", a speech given at the Key West Literary Seminar , January 5, 2006

"Reporting — one of history’s oldest professions, even as it has gone under different names — will survive and prosper, while “journalism” as a respected discipline threatens to dissolve into another branch of the entertainment industry. How will good reporting survive? Individual men and women will slip away from the crowd — away from the...

"For many tourists, the desire for authenticity is rather simplistically expressed in terms of seeking out that which is not contaminated by outside influences—particularly by the presence of other tourists. There are some important things to keep in mind here. First, nearly all tourism experiences are carefully crafted and staged by someone, specifically for our...

"There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colors. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or athiests. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They...

"Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we'd probably learn twice as much." -- Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track (1999)

"As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede...

"One of the small marvels of my first trip of Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different ways of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying movie tickets. It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike --...

"Non-travelers often warn the traveler of dangers, and the traveler dismisses such fears, but the presumption of hospitality is just as odd as the presumption of danger. You have to find out for yourself. Take the leap. Go as far as you can. Try staying out of touch. Become a stranger in a strange land....