wanderlustaddicted's VirtualTourist Home Page

«Le véritable voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux.»~Marcel Proust

«Muere lentamente quien no viaja, quien no lee, quien no oye música, quien no encuentra gracia en sí mismo»~Pablo Neruda
"So seize the day! Hold holiday!"~Song of the Harper, Ancient Egypt

"The only things I own which are still worth what they cost me are my travel memories, the mind pictures of places which I have seen which I have been hoarding like a happy miser for more than a half a century."~Burton Holmes

"Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind."~Seneca

"Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have traveled".~Mohammad

"The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page."~~St. Augustine

"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

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home."~James Michener

"Not all those who wander are lost"~J. R. R. Tolkien

"Half the fun of travel is the esthetic of lostness."~Ray Bradbury

"Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe."~Anatole France

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."~Lao-Tzu

"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."~Robert Louis Stevenson

"Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."~Mark Twain

"I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself."~James Baldwin

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.~Martin Buber

"No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous."~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."~~Robert Louis Stevenson

"The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see."~Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."~Paul Theroux

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the places and moments that take our breath away." ~Anonymous

"A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."~John Steinbeck

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.~Glenn Clark

"Your true traveler finds boredom rather more agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."~Aldous Huxley

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."~Oscar Wilde

"Old men and far travelers may lie with authority."~Anonymous

"Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."~Jack Kerouac

"I think travelers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere."~Paul Theroux

"I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine. "~Caskie Stinnet

Sadly, most of the well known quotes are by men! Here is a collection of thoughts and musings by women:

"To awaken in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world."~~Dame Freya Stark

"Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent."~Margot Fonteyn

"Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.'"~Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

"Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest."~Georgia O'Keefe

"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."~Susan Sontag

Vacation

I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray vinyl seats linked like
unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall
be summoned to the gate, soon enough
there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers
and perforated stubs—but for now
I can look at these ragtag nuclear families
with their cooing and bickering
or the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s
exhausted mother waiting to be called up early
while the athlete, one monstrous hand
asleep on his duffel bag, listens,
perched like a seal trained for the plunge.
Even the lone executive
who has wandered this far into summer
with his lasered itinerary, briefcase
knocking his knees—even he
has worked for the pleasure of bearing
no more than a scrap of himself
into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late,
they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning
—a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.

~~~Rita Dove
Reprinted from On the Wing, University of Iowa Press