Bruce Chatwin Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes, I overheard my aunts discussing these blighted destinies; and Aunt Ruth would hug me, as if to forestall my following in their footsteps. Yet, from the way she lingered over such words as 'Xanadu' or 'Samarkand' or the 'wine-dark sea,' I think she also felt the trouble of the 'wanderer in her soul. — Bruce Chatwin

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence. — Bruce Chatwin

And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling. — Bruce Chatwin

When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough. — Bruce Chatwin

To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe — Bruce Chatwin

I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered. — Bruce Chatwin

Music ... is a memory bank for finding one's way about the world. — Bruce Chatwin

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.
There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.
The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'. — Bruce Chatwin

Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber. — Bruce Chatwin

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains. — Bruce Chatwin

As the young have discovered, the secret divinity of the twentieth century is Science. But Science is incapable of forming character. The more people talk of human sciences, the less effect human sciences have on man. — Bruce Chatwin

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison. — Bruce Chatwin

It's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home. — Bruce Chatwin

Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the things of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. We give our children guns and computer games, Wendy said. They gave their children the land. — Bruce Chatwin

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up. — Bruce Chatwin

Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians
with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds
project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one. — Bruce Chatwin

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones. — Bruce Chatwin

The song and the land are one. — Bruce Chatwin

Because they knew each other's thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking. — Bruce Chatwin

Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet. — Bruce Chatwin

I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god. — Bruce Chatwin

Gradually the idea for a book began to take shape. It was to be a wildly ambitious and intolerant work, a kind of 'Anatomy of Restlessness' that would enlarge on Pascal's dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room. The argument, roughly, was as follows: that in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory 'drive' or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this 'drive' was inseparable from his central nervous system; and, that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile societies such as the gypsies were egalitarian, thing-free and resistant to change; also why, to re-establish the harmony of the First State, all the great teachers - Buddha, Lao-tse, St Francis - had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way. — Bruce Chatwin

We shall not lie on our backs at the Red Castle and watch the vultures wheeling over the valley where they killed the grandson of Genghiz. We will not read Babur's memoirs in his garden at Istalif and see the blind man smelling his way around the rose bushes. Or sit in the Peace of Islam with the beggars of Gazar Gagh. We will not stand on the Buddha's head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry-dock. We will not sleep in the nomad tent, or scale the Minaret of Jam. And we shall lose the tastes - the hot, coarse, bitter bread; the green tea flavoured with cardamoms; the grapes we cooled in the snow-melt; and the nuts and dried mulberries we munched for altitude sickness. Nor shall we get back the smell of the beanfields, the sweet, resinous smell of deodar wood burning, or the whiff of a snow leopard at 14,000 feet. — Bruce Chatwin

Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security. — Bruce Chatwin

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work. — Bruce Chatwin

The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires? — Bruce Chatwin

in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory 'drive' or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this 'drive' was inseparable from his central nervous system; and that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This — Bruce Chatwin

Anything was better than to be loved for one's things. — Bruce Chatwin

For life is a journey through a wilderness — Bruce Chatwin

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin. — Bruce Chatwin

[ ... ] I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China and continue my profession.'
'As sanitary engineer?'
'No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries in the world. — Bruce Chatwin

As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore. — Bruce Chatwin

A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will. — Bruce Chatwin

A journey is a fragment of Hell. — Bruce Chatwin

Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind. — Bruce Chatwin

I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed's dictum, 'A journey is a fragment of Hell.' — Bruce Chatwin

You're saying that man "makes" his territory by naming the "things" in it? — Bruce Chatwin

I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical. — Bruce Chatwin

And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity. — Bruce Chatwin

Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder. — Bruce Chatwin

Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot. — Bruce Chatwin

The real home of man is not his house but the road. Life itself is a travel that has to be done by foot. — Bruce Chatwin