"Today's travelers are following an institutionalized and sanitized version of the travel culture pioneered by those early drifters. Their ever-increasing numbers have spawned a separate touristic infrastructure that operates parallel to its conventional counterpart and represents a viable tourism sector in its own right. Gone are the days of the intrepid explorer. These days, travelers...

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"Tourism simulates travel, sometimes quite closely. You do pack a suitcase or two and proceed abroad with passport and travelers checks. But it is different in crucial ways. It is not self-directed but externally directed. You go not where you want to go but where the industry has decreed you shall go. Tourism soothes you...

"The paradox of nomadism. You keep moving because you're searching for a place to stay. Once you realize you can live in other countries you can never quite settle anywhere again. You can never feel quite content." --Sahra, in Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance (1999)

"Be patient, for the world is broad and wide." --William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet , Act Three, Scene Three Note : Back in the mid-nineties, I resolved to read one Shakespeare play per year until I'd read them all. I'll admit I haven't been too good at holding true to this resolution over the years,...

"A traveler has no power, no influence, and no identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among.

"If you go only once around the room, you are wiser than he who stands still." --Estonian proverb

"When any Westerner tells you that he knows the East like a book and pretends to be an authority, beware, for he is lying. Even the Westerners who stay for years rarely penetrate below a certain class in the East. They meet the Westernized, the cultured, and the rich -- and always behind this shallow...

"We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis." --Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

"Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes whose calls hold the soul-talk of decades -- all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating. These are...

"Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you, The divine ship sails the divine sea for you. Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid or liquid, You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky, For none more than you...

"Flying from one capital city to another is not travel to me. Travel, especially in Africa, must be overland and must involve the crossing of borders -- negotiating on land, usually on foot, the national frontier. That experience teaches a great deal about the state of the country. Of course, it

"The bad news is what sells the good news. In other words, the way it works --and McLuhan makes this point brilliantly in Understanding Media in 1964 -- most television is good news. The good news is the advertising. That's what it's about, and the bad news -- the dead guys and the crime --...

"Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere -- the sudden revelation that there is a there out there." --Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

"Never board a commercial aircraft if the pilot is wearing a tank top." -- Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (1991)

"Today, I think of travel as anything that extends one's realm of experience or expands one's lexicon of acquired convictions -- and occurs beyond the backyard (thus distinguishing it from reading). It is a moment that comes when we are out of our element and allows us to see, or feel, or think, anew. I...

"Only 11% of U.S. citizens even hold passports. Three times that number of people watch NASCAR races, and if there's a better definition of anti-travel -- endless circling, trapped in a lower ring of hell -- I don't want to know what it is." --Ed Readicker-Henderson, "Nos Patriam Fugimus", Motionsickness , Summer 2003

Country music legend Johnny Cash died today . He was 71 years old. "Pull up the collar on my traveling coat Sell that miserable pleasure boat I wouldn't give a nickel for another buck I'm living on muscle, guts, and luck." --Johnny Cash, "I'm Leaving Now" (2000)

"Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a...

"In every arable soil in the world we grow grain over tombs -- sure, we know this. But do not the dead generation seem to us hard and still as mummies, and their times always faded like scenes painted on walls at Pompeii? We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No...