320 Quotes About Travel-writing

As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self—the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells—and keep an objective eye on the reader.

No camera, no recording device, no laptop, none of this palm pilot nonsense or a cell phone. Paper and pencil, a book, maybe a bilingual dictionary. Anything beyond that (a) can be stolen, and (b) intimidates people you encounter. The more double-A batteries you carry, the more you distance yourself from the people you're writing about.

Il n’est pire exil que celui du coeur

the observer is, more often than not, passive. writing chiefly about his or her surroundings, and the people he or she meets. The writer reacts, instead of acts. Well, i suppose they [travel writers] do act, in that they have to do the traveling, choose the destinations, and so forth, but again, largely they are observant cargo, being shuttled from place to place with notebook in hand.

Tourists don't know where they've been. Travelers don't know where they're going.

Sometimes travelling is all about unloading that emotional baggage: the ones which are unspoken of.

Când te pregătești mult timp pentru o călătorie cred că nutrești gândul intim că nu se va realiza.

The town of Lunenburg was built on a hill running down to a sheltered harbour. On one of the upper streets stands a Presbyterian church with a huge gilded cod on its weather vane. Along the waterfront, the wooden-shingled houses are brick red, a color that originally came from mixing clay with cod-liver oil to protect the wood against the salt of the waterfront. It is the look of Nova Scotia - brick red wood, dark green pine, charcoal sea.

The green sea tortoise swim unhindered through them; this quiet underworld has here from time immemorial.