travel-writing

Back at the guest house I tried to acclimatise. A travel-worn adventurer had once told me that leaning with one's head dangling over the end of a bed was the best way to achieve this. It was while I was in this position, the blood rushing to my temples, that the door swung open.

What is a miracle if not the manifestation of light where darkness is expected?

Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice!

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one__ memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

We__ll of us__ant to feel special. We want to feel the glory that shines on us when we reach beyond our boundaries to grab at something greater, to live a heroic life, if only for a day or a week or a moment. This simple yearning is in us all, hardly recognizable, often only the merest hint that there is something more to us. This is why we seek out new places...we want to remember a somewhere that gave us the space to expand ourselves, to become a little more of who we truly are.

You will only know the road, until you have travel on it.

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235).

Your past experiences will flavour your future ones, that is human nature.

The most amazing travellers were to humble to write about it

You have to taste a culture to understand it.

There are no tips for life neither for travelling

The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.

We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301).

It__ daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

The Chinese say that there is no scenery in your home town. They__e right. Being in another place heightens the senses, allows you to see more, enjoy more, take delight in small things; it makes life richer. You feel more alive, less cocooned.

I like the idea that when I die, I will have a long sit-down chat withGod and get answers to all my questions. For example, those apple coresthat I threw out of car windows when I was a child__id any of them becometrees? Few boys or men had ever asked me out. I told myself that itwas because I was almost 6-feet tall. Was that true or was there somethinghumbling I needed to know?

You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is...frozen.