Travel Quotes

Anthony Appiah, on storytelling: "Most of what you write just comes out of you when you put your fingers on the keyboard. It's not a process over which you have a great deal of conscious control. The initial stimulus for an essay or a chapter is usually an episode--real or fictional--or an argument or a claim I've been struck by... Sometimes, though, the story is already there, waiting for me in my own history." (Paris Review, 2021) 

Anthony Bourdain: "If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food. It's a plus for everybody." 

George McGhee: "[When] there are enough threads built and built and rebuilt and twisted together around the world, like the threads that held down the giant of the Lilliputians, there will come a day when the threads of trade, of commerce, of culture, of films, of movies, of books, and of person-to-person visits, when finally the world can't blow apart--it'll be held together."

Mark Lawson: "Australia had struck me... as a sensible America. It was a nation with the same wild range of landscape, from beach to desert to throbbing metropolis, but discreetly peopled--5% of the US population in a nearly equal acreage--and these including considerably fewer psychopaths and neurotics. Australia was an America in which the populace was not possessed of the belief that it was specially blessed and directed by God, with a particular vocation to bully smaller nations." -- The Battle for Room Service (1993) 

"Australia was a culture built on British convicts, while New Zealand was a culture built on British coppers' narks." [narks = informants] 

"The tourist and the journalist have much in common. Both are dropped in strange places and expected quickly to interpret them -- though one is paid to do it and the other pays."

"The bulk of the population have always lived in the bottom right-hand corner of Australia, as if it were a bag that had been shaken." 

"'You mean you're going to Canada and you don't have to?' ... It was what you always got when you mentioned Canada to an American." 

"[V]oters are usually more interested in their own pockets than global pockets of influence." 

"There was a looming sense of doom in America, a perception that established politics had failed [especially regarding Iraq]. Many pundits had said that--after being motivated and defined for 30 years by the Communist threat--Americans seriously needed to find a new enemy."

"Even in America, it seemed bizarre that a billionaire... could successfully pose as one of the folks, standing to take back the government for the little guy." [referring to Ross Perot]

After Ross Perot's popularity, the "unnerving burden on President [Bill] Clinton was to restore democratic equilibrium--and confidence in the conventional ballot box--or America might yet be the territory for a populist, anti-political, sinister Mr. Fixit." 

"This [USA] was a nation encouraged by its leaders and teachers through two centuries to believe that it was especially blessed." 

"It was easy to think, if you were youngish and had some money and some luck, that sensible types lived where they wanted to. But for most people still it was never an option. You kept the geographical hand you were dealt. You had to remember this every time you sneered: Why would people live here? Residence was two thirds inertia." 

"America, which made a public religion of individual achievement, had become a different kind of nanny state, one based not on hand-outs but handbooks, on an entire network of support groups and counselors telling people what to do next."