Quotessence
Home / Topics / Travelogue Quotes

Travelogue Quotes

Browse 33 quotes about Travelogue.

Travelogue Quotes

“Now, I was unemployed in Beijing, and my former ambition seemed like the pollution that smudged the sky, a great green cloud composed of a billion different particles of fear and uncertainty. Without a career I hardly knew who I was anymore.”

“A PET scan of his brain activity showed diminished capacity on the left side of his brain, hence, planning ahead, strategic thinking is harmed. A positive is that he is less critical of things. He has lost language and gained singing... THAT makes for more fun. What amazes me is that so many times he returns and talks and seems to think like he used to. His voice and laugh returns to normal. How can that be???”

“Beyond them stood a far greater number of men, all dressed like human versions of classic tin soldiers; dark blue jackets, white shirts, red sashes and black top hats. Definitely not 21st century military uniform; I’d have thought that they were actors had they not, on a drum roll, unshouldered their rifles and fired into the air.”

“I love airports. I’m fascinated by how an airport runs seamlessly as one huge well-oiled machine, and to watch how, when things go wrong, as they do all the time, all those little crises are fixed by people running around like the T-cells of a mammalian immune system dealing with infections before they have chance to get out of control.”

“I am trying to get to an airport hotel. I can see it. I know it’s the right hotel because the name is shining out from the top of it in 10-foot-high illuminated letters. It is huge. It is right next to the highway. But there is no exit. I have no idea how to get there or, more pressingly, how to get off this road in the first place. There’s a lot of traffic and, worse, motorcycles with no lights are buzzing past me on the nearside. They all know where they are going and are determined to go there as fast as they can. They have no patience for a foreign visitor searching for an exit. This is no time to learn to drive all over again.”

“I kissed him, throwing my arms around his neck. I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t hold back my love. I wanted him with every part of my being. His energy pulled me down to earth and sent my legs growing into the ground like the roots of a tree. He spoke about us having 'vibes' and tried to explain it to me as though I wouldn’t know what he was talking about, like I didn’t know the language of souls, like I hadn’t noticed that when we sat next to each other the air buzzed between us.”

“I chose to trust him when he said that the sharks were like the “dogs of the sea” and took aim, plunging into a shark-less patch of ocean. The water stole all my senses in a second, then a tail called them to attention, whipping my legs as I surfaced among the bubbles, my heart pounding.”

“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 greater age would calm my fever, and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”

“It’s April 2006. It’s a Saturday. I’m walking through a market in Seoul, Korea, having a very public screaming match with a young Chinese-Korean woman whom I have recently promoted to Asia-Pacific Regional Manager. Despite the promotion, she is not happy. I think she wants my job. Right now, I’d happily give it to her if it would shut her up and calm me down. If I’d wanted a screaming match, I could have stayed at home; no, correct that, I’ve never had a domestic dispute as loud and unpleasant as this is turning out to be.”

“At about eight-thirty or nine the friends make a halt, already in sight of Moranchel. Moranchel is on the left of the Cifuentes road, at some two hundred paces from the highway. It is a gloomy, dark town that seems to have no business being surrounded by green fields. The old man sits down in the ditch and the traveler lies on his back and looks up at some little clouds, graceful as doves, which are floating in the sky. A stork flies past, not very high, with a snake in its beak. Some partridge fly up from a bed of thyme. An adolescent goatherd and a member of his flock are sinning one of the oldest of sins in the shade of a hawthorn tree blooming with tiny sweet-smelling flowers, white as orange blossoms. ― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels Through the Spanish Countryside”

“...it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map.¨”

“The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I’m surprised there weren’t more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call ‘passing’) by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle.”

“Perhaps there is to be found in Pastrana the key to something which happens in Spain more frequently than is necessary. Past splendor overwhelms and in the end exhausts the people's will; and without force of will, as can be seen in so many cases, by being exclusively occupied with the contemplation of the glories of the past, they leave current problems unsolved. When the belly is empty and the mind filled with golden memories, the golden memories continually retreat and at last, though no one goes so far as to admit it, there is even doubt whether they ever existed and there is nothing left of them but a benevolent and useless cultural residue.”

“Inwardly - nobody knows why - the passengers on one train always envy slightly the passengers on another train; it is something that's true but a little difficult to explain. Maybe it's because, even though they don't realize it very clearly, a third-class passenger would always be glad to change places with another, even if the other were third-class too. ― Camilo José Cela, Journey to the Alcarria: Travels Through the Spanish Countryside”

“The fascination of the July Monarchy public with lithographic albums was intimately related to the popularity of the travelogue, which constituted an important literary form at the time. Professional travelers and scientists as well as many of the major writers of the period dedicated themselves to this genre. Stendhal’s Promenades dans Rome (1829) and his Memoires d'un touriste (1838); Alphonse de Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient (1832-1833); Victor Hugo’s Rhin (1842); George Sand’s Lettres d'un voyageur (1834-1836); Theophile Gautier’s Tour en Belgique (1836) and his Tra los Montes (1843); and Alexandre Dumas’s Quinze jours au Sinai are some of the outstanding examples of the travelogues published in the 1830s and 1840s.”

“I love wide stretches of open land, but to the average Spaniard, who typically thrives in company and is most at home in a crowd, these fields of Extremadura (which literally means “extremely tough”) could even be intimidating, only partly because not far back in time there were bandits in the region. They were named as the ‘extreme’ end of the country. If it is at least not totally empty, there is certainly a sense of that great lonesome feeling created by the far-off, long, long line at which the earth's surface and the sky meet: a pleasant melancholy of an imagined solitary truck crawling across a plain, the ancestral memory of a caravan trail or a child’s drawing of a single emblematic tree on a small hill.”

“As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendour of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbour City, whose lights and colours spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call 'the breath of angels'...”