Chatwin Best 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

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

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

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt's house and slip through into Fillory ... it's like he's opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better. — Lev Grossman

I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us onthe long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus; and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.
Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth. I was not sure I was living or thinking any better. — Rory Stewart

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

I didn't go to acting school. — Justin Chatwin

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

He tells not a half truth, but a truth and a half — Nicholas Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really like 'Shameless' because it brings up important issues, but we get to talk and laugh and look at something that's really important that's a problem, like alcoholism and bad parenting. It's done in a funny, smart way. — Justin Chatwin

I was completely open to learning about different aspects of Scientology ... and I believe in a lot of it. — Justin 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

[ ... ] 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

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

I trust you: That's huge. That's truth. That's real love. Everyone uses 'I love you' so loosely. — Justin Chatwin

For life is a journey through a wilderness — Bruce Chatwin

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

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

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 travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote that our nomadic past lives on in our need for distraction, our mania for the new. — Gloria Steinem

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