"In traveling, I don't want to be counseled on what to enjoy. I cling to the hope that visiting a new place can be about more than what's hot and what's not; that I can still do a few things without mediation. After all, I travel partly to escape the sort of place where knowing...

"Decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take. We often put off doing something for as long as possible, then as we finally make the decision and step into the action, we're surprised by its relative ease. We're left to wonder why we dreaded doing it until we realize that most...

"Tourism has become so popular a tool for economic development that we cannot help but wonder if there will be enough tourists to fill all the places that have been made available. The answer is clearly that there are not enough tourists to go around. This makes tourism development a highly competitive industry and a...

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"The trouble with resisting temptation is that it may never come again." Note : Michael Shapiro passed along the above quote, which he found in a Chinese fortune cookie some years ago. "Though not specificially a travel quote," he says, "I've seen it in that light." A little Googling reveals that this aphorism is known...

"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have the courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called 'visions.' the whole so-called 'spirit world,'...

"I suspect it's impossible for some people to stay in one place for good, once they've left the city of their childhood." --Stephen Vizinczey, In Praise of Older Women (1965)

"I think the most dangerous thing in a world that is ever more connected is to close your eyes and to draw the curtains. In any neighborhood the person who doesn't even try to look at the neighbors is the one who is endangering himself and the others. And I think the other danger is,...

"There is still an overwhelming social compulsion -- an insanity of consensus, if you will -- to get rich from life rather than live richly, to "do well" in the world instead of living well. And, in spite of the fact that America is famous for its unhappy rich people, most of us remain convinced...

"I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within." --Lillian Smith, The Journey (1954)

"It takes an enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see -- just experience directly. But, for a time, subjective experience might benefit from a little freedom before we try to slap it into a conceptual straightjacket. Sometimes it's better to just sit and watch. It's surprising what you can learn that way." --Michael...

"What's always struck me as strange is that you read about these tragedies in which soldiers from one country, say England, crashed onto the shores of Hudson Bay and died -- they froze to death, one after the other -- in the midst of other people who have lived there for centuries. It would seem...

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"When you travel alone you quickly find that you make many more friends because people invite you into their lives much more quickly. If they see two people together, they assume it's a self-contained unit. And also, I travel to empty myself out and lose myself in a culture as much as possible and also...

"When seeing a new place, I often think: I am going to come back here later -- when I am rich, or when I have more time, or when I have a purpose, or when I am with someone I love -- and do this right. But it is a self-deception. More often than not,...

"Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected check in the mail, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at...

"When you're traveling, you are what you are, right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road." --William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways (1982)

"Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease and speed with which a person could be transported...

"All hotels are surrogates for home, some of them more luxurious, some of them less. Even the lowly ones we cherish, because in a place where all our senses are stretched -- a new city, a foreign land -- they make it OK to fall unconscious. They conquer the alien with the intimacy of a...

"Traveling with a companion, with a wife, with a girlfriend, always seems to me like birds in a glass dome, those Victorian glass things with stuffed birds inside. You are too much of a self-contained world for the rest of the world to be able to penetrate. You've got to go kind of naked into...