"A journey can become a sacred thing: Make sure, before you go, To take the time To bless your going forth, To free your heart of ballast So that the compass of your soul Might direct you toward The territories of spirit Where you will discover More of your hidden life, And the urgencies That...

"I was glad I hadn't known about this beforehand. If I'd stuck to my usual method of over-preparation, I would have read all the details about [Montmartre and its] view. I would have seen professional photos. I would have heard the dissenting voices bemoaning the crowds and those pesky kids with their soccer ball. I...

"When we have been home from abroad for a week or two, and time after time, in answer to our friends' polite inquiries, we have retold our experiences, letting phrase engender phrase, until we have made quite a good story of it all; when the unusual people we encountered have, in retrospect, become fabulous and...

"I hit the streets every day with no real plan besides walking and seeing what happens or taking a taxi across town and finding my way back. Or I look out the top of the hotel and see an area and say, okay, I’m going there today—that slum, that village. I go through souks and...

"In the souks, however, the price that is named first is an unfathomable riddle. No one knows in advance what it will be, not even the merchant, because in any case there are many prices. Each one relates to a different situation, a different customer, a different time of day, a different day of the...

"Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and...

"There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you." --Thoreau, Walking (1862)

"We found in the course of our journey the conveniences of having disencumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags, and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burthen;...

"What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is to be needed by the intending visitor....

"The anti-tourist rhetoric of consumption usually goes like this: Your holidays demonstrate a lack of sophistication. You indulge in cheap pleasures and buy tacky souvenirs. You show no restraint or moderation, you overeat, overdrink, overspend. You are far too passive, just dozing in the hammock, hanging around the pool, or letting yourself be transported from...

"The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. "This is what I saw" -- news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. "They're just...

"This is the travel platitude to end all travel platitudes: it's not about the place, it's about the people. Agreed. So let's not forget that even on the tourist trail -- especially here, come to think of it -- you can meet all kinds of people who are interesting and worldly and not at all...

"When I finally did have enough money, I got a backpack and went to Europe and bought a Eurail pass. I was eighteen. I would recommend that to anybody. Although it would be different now because no one is really ever cut off from anybody anymore. To do that then was really to be severed...

"Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw -- actually saw -- a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century; there'd be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the...

"Professor James Petrick of Texas A&M, who focuses on psychology and marketing and their application to tourism, has studied when tourists return to destinations or hotels they’ve visited before. Like many in the field, he believes meeting expectations is a key factor. The take-away for travelers: don’t idealize the places you’re visiting and you’ll be...

"The world is not as small as Google Earth depicts it. I think of the Lower River district in Malawi, the hinterland of Angola, the unwritten-about north of Burma and its border with Nagaland. Nearer home, the urban areas of Europe and the United States. I do not know of a book that recounts the...

"Museums have long served as surrogates for travel, a particularly important role before the advent of mass tourism. They have from their inception preserved souvenirs of travel, as evidence in their collections of plants, animals, minerals, and examples of the arts and industries of the world's cultures. While the museum collection itself is an undrawn...

"But where's the fun? Where's the adventure? It's not just "If it's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium," it's "If it's seven o'clock, this must be the Café Le Petit Obsessive-Compulsive, this wine must be the Pinot Noir that I read about on Wines.com, the server must be Yvette, who got high marks on TripAdvisor, and...

"GPS navigation, in its present form, …dulls our receptivity to our surroundings by granting us the supposed luxury of not having to pay attention to them at all. In travel facilitated by “location awareness,” we begin to encounter places not by attending to what they present to us, but by bringing our expectations to them,...

"Pilgrims were people who figured things out as they walked. On the road you can think forward, you can think back, you can make a list to remember to tell those at home." --Anne Carson, "Kinds of Water" (1987)