"There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it always has been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to...

"These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation -- now there's a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is...

"The main mistake made by pro-tourist planners is that they see tourism only in traditional economic terms as a new kind of industry (it is called the tourist industry) and they try to build tourist factories, called 'resorts' and 'amusement parks', through which people are run assembly-line fashion and stripped of their money. Some Caribbean...

"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...

"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,...

"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...

"There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties or ease it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and...

"My fear had nothing to do with the actual French people. What scared me was the idea of French people I'd gotten from movies and situation comedies. When someone makes a spectacular ass of himself, it's always in a French restaurant, never a Japanese or Italian one. The French are people who slap one another...

"The characteristic thing about Paris is not so much the extent -- though that is vast -- as the overwhelming variety of its reputation. It has become so overlaid with successive plasterings of paste and proclamation that it has come to resemble those rotten old houses one sometimes sees during their demolition, whose crumbling frame...

"The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at the table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where...

"Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late twentieth century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you find they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London." --William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain (1997)

"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 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)

"Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these three axes, and since space is itself three-dimensional, five axes are necessary if we are...

"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)

"Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies...

"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...

"Tourism enables people to use part of their free time to contemplate the goodness and beauty of God in his creation and, through contact with others, helps to intensify mutual dialogue and acquaintance. Thus free time and tourism can compensate for the lack of human contact that is often felt in daily life." --Pope John...

"Reproduction and mere survival have never been good enough for humankind. We torture one another, we torture ourselves, we torture the universe with our questioning, our endless strife, the tedious struggle against death. Even a simple hike up Whitney, even the mild walk and scramble to the apex of Sierra Blanco in Colorado, involves that...