Quotes & Sayings About American Tourists

My mother complained about the Parisians' habit of bumping into tourists on the narrow sidewalks. 'Am I bumping into them?' she asked, perplexed. 'I feel like such a clumsy American.' 'No, no,' I corrected. 'That's their way of saying hello. — Kate Betts

Tourism is the great soporific. It's a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there's something interesting in their lives. It's musical chairs in reverse ... All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit. The tourists smile at their tans and their shiny teeth and think they're happy. But the suntans hide who they really are
salary slaves, with heads full of American rubbish. Travel is the last fantasy the 2oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself. — J.G. Ballard

In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker. — Mohsin Hamid

women of exotic appearance. — Michael Moorcock

The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American. — Bernice Johnson Reagon

He said that for those who hadn't been to California, what it was most like was an enchanted island. The spitting image. Just like in the movies, but better. People live in houses, not apartment buildings, he said, and then he embarked on a comparison of houses (one-story, at most two-story), and four- or five-story buildings where the elevator is broken one day and out of order the next. The only way buildings compared favorably to houses was in terms of proximity. A neighborhood of buildings makes distances shorter, he said. Everything is closer. You can go walking to buy groceries or you can walk to your local tavern (here he winked at Reverend Foster), or the local church you belong to, or a museum. In other words, you don't need to drive. You don't even need a car. And here he recited a list of statistics on fatal car accidents in a county of Detroit and a county of Los Angeles. And that's even considering that cars are made in Detroit, he said, not Los Angeles. — Roberto Bolano

Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Tourists came around and looked into our tipis. That those were the homes we choose to live in didn't bother them at all. The untied the door, opened the flap, and barged right in, touching our things, poking through our bedrolls, inspecting everything. It boggles my mind that tourists feel they have the god-given right to intrude everywhere. — Russell Means

He talks about you...he thinks you're beautiful... — Richie Tankersley Cusick

On the economy, the U.S. cumulatively is our most important investor, most important trading partner, most important sort of tourists, and we have now a tie that will ... a link that will be here for many, many years to come, and that is the big Philippine-American community in the United States - three million of them. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

This country needs room to grow and expand. In all my own newspapers I read frightful tales of the shameful atrocities being perpetrated on our Democratic minorities in Maine and Vermont. My patience is almost at an end, and if provoked much further I will place both countries under American protection, even if I have to send in my tourists to start trouble so I'll have to send in a force to restore order. — Gracie Allen

The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, bound down by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences. — Che Guevara

Do you realize that in the past sixty years, the only foreigners the French have been able to drive out are American tourists? — Robert Orben

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass — Virginia Woolf

Stories aren't facts, Cait, they're not details. Stories are feelings. You've got your feelings, haven't you?"
"Too many," I said.
"Well, that's all you need." He put his hand on mine. "Cry yourself a story, love. It works. Believe me."
So that's what I did, I cried myself a story.
And this is it. — Kevin Brooks

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. — Henry David Thoreau

George liked it so, that this island was uncompromising and hard for tourists to negotiate. Not all welcome smiles and black men in Hawaiian shirts, playing pan by the poolside. No flat, crystal beaches, no boutique hotels. Trinidad was oil-rich, didn't need tourism. Trinidadians openly sniggered at the sunburnt American women who wandered down the pavement in shorts and bikini top. Trinidad was itself; take it or leave it. — Monique Roffey

Kelly Nakata didn't know much about what was going on, but she knew that once a dog starts biting for no good reason, it doesn't tend to stop. — Mira Grant

You're in Ireland the summer after you left college and you're drinking at a pub near the castle where every day bus loads of English and American tourists come to kiss the Blarney Stone. — Chuck Palahniuk

The Anti-Vivisector does not deny that physiologists must make experiments and even take chances with new methods. He says that they must not seek knowledge by criminal methods, just as they must not make money by criminal methods. He does not object to Galileo dropping cannon balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa; but he would object to shoving off two dogs or American tourists. — George Bernard Shaw

Corey was hanging out down by the port one afternoon with Karl and Jacques when a bus-load of american tourists drove by, and in a moment of clarity Corey suddenly perceived Karl in the light of reality rather than through the kaleidoscope of fashion: the tourists were staring open-mouthed through the bus windows, ice creams held in mid-air, gawping at the apparition that was Karl. Jacques was driving the mobylette and Karl sat behind riding side-saddle dressed in hot pants, long strands of pearls and dark glasses; he was wielding a raw frankfurter straight from the packet in one hand and a bottle of coca-cola in the other. I remember thinking "I am with this total freak," says Corey. — Alicia Drake

I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done. — D.H. Lawrence

God is using people to accomplish His work, of saving souls, but we have to remember that it is not us doing the work. It's God using our vessel. — Monica Johnson

I know sneakers aren't very French-I should be wearing pointy boots or scary heels-but at least they aren't white. It's true what they say about white sneakers. Only American tourists wear them,big ugly things made for mowing grass or painting houses. — Stephanie Perkins

Our Father which art in heaven!' To appreciate this word of adoration aright, I must remember that none of the saints had in Scripture ever ventured to address God as their Father. The invocation places us at once in the centre of the wonderful revelation the Son came to make of His Father as our Father too. It comprehends the mystery of redemption - Christ delivering us from the curse that we might become the children of God. The mystery of regeneration - the Spirit in the new birth giving us the new life. And the mystery of faith - ere yet the redemption is accomplished or understood, the word is given on the lips of the disciples to prepare them for the blessed experience still to come. The words are the key to the whole prayer, to all prayer. It — Andrew Murray

London was a city of ghosts, some deader than others.
Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn't unlike any other major city - New York or Paris or Sydney - but he felt instinctively that London was ... at the extreme. The darker side of that history, as opposed to the parks, palaces and pearly kings' side that made busloads of Japanese and American tourists gawk and jabber. The hidden history of a city where the lonely, the dispossessed, the homeless, wandered the streets, brushing shoulders with the shadows of those that had come before them. A city in which the poor and the plague-ridden, those long-since hanged for stealing a loaf or murdered for a shilling, jostled for position with those seeking a meal, or a score, or a bed for the night.
A city where the dead could stay lost a long time — Mark Billingham

In one case, a group of innocent American tourists was taken on a tour bus through a country the members later described as "either France or Sweden" and subjected to three days of looking at old, dirty buildings in cities where it was not possible to get a cheeseburger. — Dave Barry

Canadians don't get curious when American tourists buy lots of food," I said. "If the guy thought about it all, he probably figured I wanted to take the doughnuts home, or to my church group or academic conference or whatever."
Sig eyed my clothes doubtfully. "How did he know you were American?"
"I made sure I talked loud," I said. — Elliott James

There's nothing American tourists like more than the things they can get at home. — Stephen Colbert

American writers are too often only witnesses, tourists, to most human suffering and pleasure. — Ira Sadoff

You? You can't believe this? I'm the one who has to go to Artemis to save your ass. She was freaking out over Zarek, now how the hell do I explain to her that Mr. Cool-Calm-and-Collected was doing his impression of Spider Man in a bar loaded with tourists and ended up as the main feature on Tokyo news as what's wrong with American culture? Question. How many rules did you break in less than a minute? (Acheron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Fifteen minutes later, what she got was the most remarkable thing she had ever seen in her life. And Rue had once witnessed a whole party of American tourists actually refuse to drink tea, in a London teahouse, so that's saying something. The — Gail Carriger

This is the enemy, what is irreversible, what has already reached the farthest of places. There is no going back. They can bomb bus-loads of tourists, burn the American flag, but they are not shooting the enemy. It is already with them, inside them, what makes them resentful, defensive, what makes them no longer confident of their vision of the world. — Leila Aboulela

Why would you care what happened to me? That's all in the past." Jagger bent down and touched his forehead to hers. "Because you're mine. And 'mine' means you have my protection. 'Mine' means I'll look after you. It means nothing happens you don't want to happen and no one touches you without your consent. It means your life is in my hands and I will do everything in my power to ensure you are safe and secure and your needs are met. It means something happened to you that twisted your perception so bad, you look at us and you see only them. I'll make that right. I'll give you justice. I'll give you back whatever was taken from you. — Anonymous