"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Here's another one from Mark Twain: “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
"The joy of Italy often consists of doing ordinary things in extraordinary settings." Erica Jong
"I am a Southerner. I like the feel of these words. I could no more be otherwise than I could shed my outer skin or change the color of my eyes." Willie Morris
Posts: 1538 | Location: on the Alabama River | Registered: 22 July 2002
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” - Maya Angelou
I love this about travel planning, from "Casablanca"
quote:
Captain Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca? Rick : My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters. Captain Renault : The waters? What waters? We're in the desert. Rick : I was misinformed.
Here's one I always copy into my travel journals (the first two sentences, anyway).
quote:
"Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls." — Edward Abbey
Posts: 16049 | Location: The Beautiful San Francisco Bay Area | Registered: 06 August 2001
Paul Bowles did not say these words about travel, but when I travel, I think about them…
"… How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
One of my favorites is from Corby Kummer...Italophile and editor at Atlantic Magazine.
I've long taken what friends call an unwholesome attitude toward travel: whenever I get off a flight of more than a couple of hours and the airport isn't in Milan or Rome, I think, "I could have gone to Italy."
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
From the article "Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood" by Michael Chabon, in the July 16 issue of the NY Review of Books
quote:
The traveler soon learns that the only way to come to know a city, to form a mental map of it, however provisional, and begin to find his or her own way around it is to visit it alone, preferably on foot, and then become as lost as one possibly can.
The greatest thing I learn when traveling is about myself. I learn more about my own culture as I view, interpret, admire, enjoy and immerse myself in other cultures.
“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy
quote:
“I am not the same having seen the moon rise on the other side of the world.” - Mary Ann Rademacher
Posts: 16049 | Location: The Beautiful San Francisco Bay Area | Registered: 06 August 2001
Originally posted by Jim Zurer: One of my favorites is from Corby Kummer...Italophile and editor at Atlantic Magazine.
I've long taken what friends call an unwholesome attitude toward travel: whenever I get off a flight of more than a couple of hours and the airport isn't in Milan or Rome, I think, "I could have gone to Italy."
Jim
I am SO in agreement!!
And let me add
"The world is divided into 2 parts, Italy and Not Italy" - me.
I have always promised myself that I'm going to spend my declining years just taking walks in Rome -- nothing could be more profitable, I think, for the last 20 years of one's life.
------Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, July 18, 1948
From an essay by Muriel Sparks in which she writes about her love the the place she found in Pienza:
It isn't necessarily the great and famous beauty spots we fall in love with. As with people, so with places: Love is unforeseen, and we can all find ourselves affectionately attached to the minor and the less obvious.
When I read this quote from Pico Iyer a few years ago, I was struck by how much it spoke to me.
"We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world .... And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more."
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world .... And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more."
That is just simply beautiful! And I think so true for many people.
"Youth is beautiful, but it flies away! Who would be cheerful, let him be; for of the morrow there is no certainty." Lorenzo the Magnificent
