19 Quotes by Colin Thubron

Trekkers at high altitudes sometimes sense a person walking a few paces behind them, just out of sight. Often this person is dead. I never feel this, but once or twice I imagine someone walking a little ahead of me.

Em Samarcanda, dois séculos antes da invenção do telescópio, Ulug Beg registava a trajetória de mil e dezoito estrelas e recalculava o ano estelar com uma diferença de segundos em relação aos resultados obtidos atualmente pela eletrónica.

Se houve um momento fatal no destino da Rota da Seda, talvez não tenha sido a tomada de Constantinopla, nem o enclausuramento da China pelos Ming, nem o desembarque de Colombo, mas sim o dia, algures no século X, em que um chinês desconhecido descobriu a bússola marítima.

Enquanto baluarte, a Muralha não fazia sentido. Os hunos, os mongóis e os manchus transpuseram-na quase sem impedimento. (…) Talvez, de uma forma não intencional, ela constituísse menos uma defesa física do que uma monstruosa delimitação. Separava a civilização da barbárie, a luz das trevas.

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken.

The attributes you need to be a travel writer are somewhat contradictory. For travel you need to be tough and resilient and to write you must be sensitive and sympathetic.

A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.

Once, at the dreaming dawn of history – before the world was categorized and regulated by mortal minds, before solid boundaries formed between the mortal world and any other – fairies roamed freely among men, and the two races knew each other well. Yet the knowing was never straightforward, and the adventures that mortals and fairies had together were fraught with uncertainty, for fairies and humans were alien to each other.

Siberia: it fills one twelfth of the land-mass of the whole Earth, yet this is all it leaves for certain in the mind. A bleak beauty, and an indelible fear.