Thubron Quotes & Sayings

The story of Sherlock Holmes, on the surface, is about detection, but in reality, it's about the best of two men who save each other - a lost, washed-up war hero and a man who could end up committing murders instead of solving them. They come together. They become this perfect unit. They become the best friendship ever, and they become heroes. That's what we fall in love with, not Sherlock on his own. No one can love that man on his own, but Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson - the best friends ever. — Steven Moffat

Siberia: it fills one twelfth of the land-mass of the whole Earth, yet this is all it leaves for certain in the mind. A bleak beauty, and an indelible fear. — Colin Thubron

A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets. — Colin Thubron

We have a debt the size of our economy, which makes us look a lot like Greece. — Mitch McConnell

A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort — Colin Thubron

A snowdrift is a beautiful thing-if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination. — Hal Borland

Just as the roads at Moscow's heart flow out in concentric ripples from the Kremlin, so this tension too seems to radiate from those secret and formidable walls, lapping outward to the suburbs and to the farthest confines of the Soviet Union itself, in ever-weakening but pervasive rings. — Colin Thubron

My professor, he reminded us of Kant: to think by oneself, to think in accordance with oneself. Today they say that's logocentric, not politically correct. Streams must flow in the right direction so that they may converge. Why all this cultural bustling? Just to assure oneself that everyone is speaking of the same thing. Of what? Of Otherness. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Sometimes I feel it is best to experience as little as possible. I have become so accustomed to the sight of blood that this afternoon I witnessed the execution of two soldiers for cowardice. All that occurred to me was that their severed heads went rolling about just like dice. This only goes to show what I have always held: that horrors do not sharpen but blunt the senses. An old friend once set above his vestibule door the blood-soaked cuirass in which his father was killed. He put it there, he said, as a perpetual reminder of the horror of violence. And was he reminded? The first time he passed the vestibule, yes. The second time, maybe. The third time not at all, and thereafter he grew used to it, and was later killed in an amphitheatre riot with his fingers on another man's throat. — Colin Thubron

Consider spending less time talking, and more time prototyping, especially if you're not very good at talking. — Paul Buchheit

Between valleys I took the stone stairways laid down by villages, and would glimpse the farmers toiling up below me in crocodiles of decorated straw hats, or waiting in curiosity above. — Colin Thubron

Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here ... and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world ... — Colin Thubron

I am travelling with this mystique myself, I know. It has grown out of childhood, and adolescent reading. This looking-glass Tibet is a realm of ancient learning lost to the rest of the world, ruled by a lineage of monks who are reincarnations of divinity. Recessed beyond the greatest mountain barrier on earth, in plateaux of cold purity, it floats in its own time. It is a land forbidden to intruders not by human agency but by some mystical interdiction. So it resonates like the memory of something lost, a survival from a purer time, less a country than a region in the mind. Perhaps it holds the keys to the afterlife — Colin Thubron

What was it like when your mother passed away?" I asked Mimi. "I was twenty-eight years old. I had just given birth to John when I found out Mother had died from a stomach ulcer. A sudden infection. She had just made plans to come from Washington, D.C. to see him." She paused. "I'll never forget the telegram my sister Marion sent. I couldn't believe it. It was so final. Suddenly, the world seemed very dark. I couldn't imagine how I was going to live without her and I grieved deeply that she was never able to see her first grandchild. But I will tell you, Terry, you do get along. It isn't easy. The void is always with you. But you will get by without your mother just fine and I promise you, you will become stronger and stronger each day. — Terry Tempest Williams

mountains, and cried: 'That is the tomb of Kochoi, the companion of Manas! — Colin Thubron

The attributes you need to be a travel writer are somewhat contradictory. For travel you need to be tough and resilient and to write you must be sensitive and sympathetic. — Colin Thubron

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term; the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it. And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them. — Gregory David Roberts

Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events. — Marshall McLuhan

Once, at the dreaming dawn of history
before the world was categorized and regulated by mortal minds, before solid boundaries formed between the mortal world and any other
fairies roamed freely among men, and the two races knew each other well. Yet the knowing was never straightforward, and the adventures that mortals and fairies had together were fraught with uncertainty, for fairies and humans were alien to each other. — Colin Thubron

I've been in very many situations where I've not liked the other members of the band or they have not liked me. I grew up presuming that's the way music was made. It doesn't need to be that way. It's taken me years years to find that out. — John Lydon

As the track bends north-east, the ethereal sandstone disappears. The slopes turn black with granite, and the mountain's lower ridges break into unstable spikes and revetments. Their ribs are slashed in chiaroscuro, and their last outcrops pour towards the valley in the fluid, anthropomorphic shapes that pilgrims love. The spine and haunches of a massive stone beast, gazing at Kailas, are hailed as the Nandi bull, holy to Shiva; another rock has become the votive cake of Padmasambhava. — Colin Thubron

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken — Colin Thubron