Travel Books Quotes

• Traveling - it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

  Ibn Battuta

  Inspirational, Travel, Adventurous

  235 Copy quote

• A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

  Laozi

  Inspirational, Life, Summer

  72 Copy quote

• Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Life, Travel

  Mark Twain, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (2009). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.479, Courier Corporation

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• Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

  Mark Twain

  Travel, Fun, Adventure

  Mark Twain (2008). “The Innocents Abroad”, p.650, Velvet Element Books

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• All that is gold does not glitter.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Being Strong, Travel, Fantasy Novels

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings”, p.179, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The more you read, the more things you will know.

  Dr. Seuss

  Educational, Reading, Places To Go

  39 Copy quote

• I fear that I can no longer travel without technology. Twenty years ago, I loved getting on a bus in West Africa and taking off for a city I'd never been to before, relying on advice from out-of-date travel books and fellow passengers on the bus. Now, I end up using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps. I probably eat and sleep better when I'm on the road, but I miss the mystery of travel when it was more random and unpredictable.

  Ethan Zuckerman

  Book, Sleep, Technology

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.

  Paul Theroux

  Travel, Book, Reading

  Paul Theroux (2011). “The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road”, p.6, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

  John Green

  Book, Knowing, People

  John Green (2010). “Paper Towns”, p.137, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time, having a miserable time, even better. You don't want to read a book about someone having a great time in the South of France, eating and drinking and falling in love. What you want to read is a book about a guy going through the jungle, going through the arctic snow, having a terrible time trying to cross the Sahara, and solving problems as they go.

  Paul Theroux

  Falling In Love, Drinking, Book

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.

  Paul Theroux

  Strong, Book, Writing

  Paul Theroux (2001). “The Best American Travel Writing 2001”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

  Paul Fussell

  Travel, Book, Romance

  Paul Fussell (1982). “Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars”, p.203, Oxford University Press

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• I suppose anyone who has ever written a travel book has had the experience of being accosted by a reader with blood in his eye and a lawsuit in his voice.

  Ilka Chase

  Book, Eye, Voice

  Ilka Chase (1963). “Elephants Arrive at Half-past Five”, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday

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• The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

  Alain de Botton

  Book, Secret, Fascination

  4 Copy quote

• Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Dream, Travel, Book

  "Living memories". Interview with Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. February 18, 2005.

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• Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

  Jonathan Raban

  Travel, Book, Journey

  Jonathan Raban (1987). “For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1969-1987”

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• I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Book, Worst, Novel

  Evelyn Waugh (1983). “The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh”, Methuen

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• My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.

  Beverly Cleary

  Mother, Father, Book

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• Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes . . . all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating.

  Phil Cousineau

  Book, Reading, Practice

  9 Copy quote

• A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

  Paul Theroux

  Travel, Book, Writing

  Interview with Michael Shapiro, www.sfgate.com. May 28, 2011.

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• Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

  Paul Theroux

  Travel, Book, Novelists

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• Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.

  Paul Theroux

  Falling In Love, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Good travel books are novels at heart.

  Jonathan Raban

  Book, Heart, Novel

  Recalled by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the NewYorkTimes, 26 Jan1987, reviewing Raban's novel Coasting (1986).

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• Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'

  Arthur Smith

  Book, Tuscany, Excellent

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• The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

  Bill Bryson

  Book, Successful, Firsts

  5 Copy quote