Paul Theroux Quotes About Travel
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.
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In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.
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Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
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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.
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Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
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Truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience - shocking though it may seem at the time - is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
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You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.
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Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.
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The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.
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Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
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Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
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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, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
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Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.
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