17 Quotes by Sara Wheeler

A resident [of Chukotka] had stuck a flyer on a telegraph pole advertising his flat in exchange for a one-way ticket to Moscow. Unemployment runs at seventy per cent in the surrounding villages.

Turgenev complained in a letter that Spring in Europe lacked the explosiveness of that season in Russia.

Tolstoy was obsessed with truth, but only told it in his novels. Dostoyevsky, obsessed not with truth but with God, was a compulsive gambler. He pawned his watch so many times that his saintly second wife said she never knew what time it was.

Their [500 Siberian Tribes] presence predated Russians by thousands of years. Yet they are routinely referred to as 'half-thawed humanity' and 'descendants of fish'...

The sun never sets there [Siberia] - one end wakes up when the other is going to sleep. In parts it is so cold that living trees explode with a sound like gunfire...

Forbidden zones were familiar to the point of institutionalisation in the Soviet System, but more than forty 'sensitive' cities remain shut off.

I believed that what mattered to God was the direction I was facing not how far away I was. Sin it seemed to me was the refusal to let God be God.

Don’t you sometimes find daily life almost unbearably poetic? Minute curiosity is a requirement of the travel writer – as it is of the biographer, novelist and poet. The significance of the trivial is what makes a piece of travel writing human, not the stuntish business of being the first person to paddle the Congo. Out there on the road, I have often found that the most aimless and boring interludes yield, in the long run, the most fertile material.