Get Inspired: Lesser-Known Travel Quotes

July 31, 2016

The Green Lion

By now, we are all well-acquainted with quotes telling us that a thousand-mile long journey must be started with a single step, asking why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere, or convincing us that not all those who wander are lost. These quotes are great, and they surely inspired all of us at some point, but we’ve seen them, we’ve shared them, and it’s time to move on.

I put together a list of lesser-known travel quotes, including some that might not be as romantic (because travel always isn’t all flowers, lollipops, and rainbows, and whoever disagrees simply hasn’t traveled enough.

Most of these were taken out of my favorite books, including Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (because, how inspiring can a passage from a book of hers be? Kidding. Still love you, Sylvia).

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. ― Jack Kerouac, On The Road

“At this rate, I’d be lucky if I wrote a page a day.Then I knew what the problem was.I needed experience.How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?” ― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” — Paul Theroux

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.” ― Jack Kerouac, On The Road

“But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?” ― Jack Kerouac, On The Road

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable. ― Clifton Fadiman

“I wished I was on the same bus as her. A pain stabbed my heart as it did everytime I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.” ― Jack Kerouac, On The Road

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.” ―Anthony Bourdain, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.” ― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok— I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. ― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.” ― Anthony Bourdain

“My yearn for home is broadened
Patriotism expanded
By callings from beyondSo I pack my things
Nothing precious
All things sacred”— Alanis Morissette

Learn to detach … Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent … But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate fully. — Mitch Albom

“I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies.” ― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

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

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” — Miriam Beard

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 saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.” — Silvya Plath, The Bell Jar