"Eventually I realized that many of the most important changes in my life had come about because of my travel experiences. For, however tame when compared to the excursion of real adventurers, these trips were genuine adventures for me: I struggled with my fears and limitations, and I learned whatever I was able to learn."...

"I don't pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn't so-and-so many measured units; it's events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness." --Poul Anderson, The Boat of a Million Years (1989)

"I was obsessed with the idea of travel -- not so much to see specific places, but rather because I took pleasure in upheaval. I thought constant deracination was the only way to know who I was, as though by moving around I could distinguish myself from the web of people and routines that enmeshed...

"Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object." --Jonathan Raban, Old Glory (1981)

"In a culture where the possibility of wealth and the acquisition of things is so defining of success, we end up pursuing things that, even if we are successful, can never deliver what we envisioned they would. The reason riches become such a snare is because we end up evaluating life in mercenary terms and...

"I don

"It is hard to notice age in those who dream." --Charles Plymell, "In Memory of My Father" (1977) Note : Though a minor figure among Beat writers, Charles Plymell is the reigning counterculture poet to hail from Wichita, where I grew up. His book The Last of the Moccasins , a fictional recounting of Wichita...

"A spiritual necessity...travel must rank with the more serious forms of endeavor. Admittedly there are other ways of making the world's acquaintance. But the traveler is a slave to his senses; his grasp of a fact can only be complete when reinforced by sensory evidence; he can know the world, in fact, only when he...

"You can't see the teeth on a buzz-saw. ...Too much diversion can keep us from knowing how miserable or how happy we are, what bores we are or what fun, how much we want, need or lack. Each day on the river I shed more and more of my external self until I find eventually...

"There are some things in life, and they may be the most important things, that we cannot know by research or reflection, but only by committing ourselves. We must dare in order to know. Life is full of situations to which I can respond not with part of myself but only with commitment of my...

"Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have." --Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)

"As tourists, we have reason to hope that the quaint anachronism we have discovered will always remain 'unspoiled,' as fixed as a museum piece for inspection. It is perilous, however, to assume that its inhabitants will long for the same. Indeed, a kind of imperial arrogance underlies the very assumption that the people of the...

"When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision." --Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988)

"Oh, looking for adventure, are ya? Well you can tell you're having a real adventure when you wished you were home in bed." --Spalding Gray, quoting a janitor in a bar, Sex and Death to the Age 14 (1986)

"The problem is that, unversed in the local language, their vision framed by the boilerplate of literature, [travelers] often fail to see the new land with their own eyes. Gradually, a kind of self-creating travel circuit emerges, reinforced by travelers who have read the same books; the route becomes populated by people enthusiastically confirming one...

"I don't believe in doing work I don't want to do in order to live the way I don't want to live." --Edward Abbey, The Fool's Progress (1988)

"Fortunately, embracing the spiritual side of travel doesn't require that you don a robe and lose your mind. What we know as personal travel, after all, is the historical legacy not of exploration or commerce, but of pilgrimage -- the non-political, non-material quest for private discovery and growth. Indeed, regardless of whether or not you...

"We clutter the earth with our inventions, never dreaming that possibly they are unnecessary -- or disadvantageous. We devise astounding means of communication, but do we communicate with one another? We move our bodies to and fro and incredible speeds, but do we really leave the spot we started from? Mentally, morally, spiritually, we are...

"Travel has woken me up, in many ways. It's taught me how provincial I and my assumptions are. It's expanded my sense of what is possible among human beings and in terms of human kindness (and at times its opposite). And it has shown me a whole other way to live, without a steady prop,...

"An adventure is never an adventure when it