Travel Quotes

Belgium 3Q

A lot has happened since I returned from Haiti. I wrote a little piece about it. I cut my hair for the first time in over a decade and have since grown it back. I watched all seven seasons of The Office. I wrote a poem a week for a year. I have a new job (and am soon to be unemployed for expatriate travel to Belgium). Also, I think I have decided that I do like olives after all.

Additionally, I have re-awakened this old blog, because I want to have a few different ways to keep folks posted about my time abroad… if you’re reading this, this proves that you care and that I am therefore justified in believing that I should scribble a few things now and then about how much cheese I will eat in Europe.

And because this blog’s title comes from one of my favorite travel quotations, I thought that I’d start by putting together a little list of my top 10 favorite travel quotes (no particular order, just general awesomeness):

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”
-Bill Bryson

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
-Mark Twain

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
-John Steinbeck (this one in particular, I need to take to my tiny, type-A personality heart)

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
-Henry Miller

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
-Cesare Pavese

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
-Martin Buber

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien

“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

– William Least Heat Moon

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.”
– Mark Jenkins