You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it’s all right.
There are homes you run from, and homes you run to.
I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.
It was kind of solemn drifting down the big still river laying on our backs looking up at stars and we didn’t even feel like talking aloud.
Wandering reestablishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person.
It was on that road and at that hour that I first became aware of my own self, experienced an inexpressible state of grace, and felt at one with the first breath of air that stirred, the first bird, and the sun so newly born that it still looked not quite round.
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
To explain why we become attached to our birthplaces, we pretend that we are trees and speak of “roots.” Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.
The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sightseeing.”
Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.
No vacation goes unpunished.
Remember: no matter where you go, there you are.
People travel to faraway places to watch in fascination the kind of people they ignore at home.
Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels.
If an ass goes traveling, he will not come home a horse.
A certain businessman, renowned for his ruthlessness, once made a vow in Mark Twain’s presence. “Before I die,” he declared, “I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud at the top.” “I have a better idea,” Twain replied. “You could stay home in Boston and keep them.”
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.
I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
If you lived in your heart, you’d be home by now.
