As Henry James had said in a letter to a do-gooding friend, Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is n...
Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people’s.
But that did not strike me as immoderate. It was a society that was pledged to austerity that was probably the most prone to going on binges. So, philosophically, the name didn’t fit. But
Africa had been deliverance for me, a liberating embrace and an opportunity.
A train journey is travel; everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands.—GRB
It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.
What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere if you’re not in a hurry.
We have bestowed on Africa just enough of the disposable junk of the modern world to create in African cities a junkyard replica of the West,
The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Singhalese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, I...
The trains [in a country] contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, In...
The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic,
The disorder in Yashar's apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order - the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himse...
Raging politeness, this extreme friendliness is sometimes termed, but even if that is true, it is better than the cold stare or the averted eyes or the calculated snub I was used to in New England.
No one was interested in Malabo - this was why the people in the village must have suspected him of having a deeper motive for visiting. He wanted something from them - why else would he come all this...
Malmesbury, was an example, a market town in an old farming district, surrounded by wheat fields, on Hansie’s route to Springbok. This town, too, had grown.
Believe me, England’s prisons are full of splendid people.
A sense of hopelessness had weighed me down like a fever since I’d stepped across the border weeks before. And with this fever came a vision that had sharpened, coming into greater focus, as if inviti...
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for...
You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elabora...
MOST TRAVEL, AND CERTAINLY the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life. This risky su...