The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unus...
Which proved yet again, as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind.
Went by back roads, past pines, swamps, shacks, the small towns of Lorman and Fayette, a school flying a Confederate flag, and down one road on which for some miles there were large lettered signs wit...
We walk through ourselves, Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, summing up the travel experience, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting o...
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend,...
The idea for elephant-back safaris was initially that of the photographer, socialite, and Africa hand Peter Beard, who suggested to Moore in the 1980s that riding elephants through the bush was unprec...
The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.
Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is s...
People will tell you, What’s the use? What’s the point of reading novels and poetry? They’ll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books w...
One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South. What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgi...
In one case, at a meeting at Alpha Gamma Delta, active sorority members . . . began standing up to voice support for the [black] recruit and challenge alumnae decisions. The entire house wanted this g...
I had some good friends - really funny ones. My best friend was a guy called Apolo Nsibambi. We shared an office at the Extra Mural Department at Makerere, and then I got a promotion - became Acting D...
How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there
England resembles a ship in its shape' wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Traits. He was wrong... England, of course, resembles a pig, with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; i...
Colonialism oppressed and subverted Africans and remade them as scavengers, pleaders, and servants
But so little has changed. This is practically the same country I left thirty-five years ago. Maybe worse. The government doesn’t even care enough to help you.’ This was too broad a subject. She said...
Borges, who said, Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve.
A little farther on, he said, What do you think of India? It’s a hard question, I said. I wanted to tell him about the children I had seen that morning pathetically raiding the leftovers of my breakfa...
I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.
Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist,...