Tourist Place Quotes & Sayings

Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. — Jamaica Kincaid

And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems. — Donna George Storey

By the standards of a tourist strolling past looking for a quick lunch, the place was a dive. The sign on the window was small and easy to miss, and the antique feel of the place wasn't the prepackaged, old-shit-on-the-wall nostalgia that came with so many chain restaurants. The cafe was just old, and everything about it said old. But Jon liked it that way, if only because it kept the tourists away and spared him from hearing imported ignorance when there was plenty of local ignorance to go around. — Scott B. Pruden

The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived. His house was just one of many stopping places in a restless, unmoored existence, and this lack of center had the effect of turning him into a perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life. You never had the feeling that he could be located. — Paul Auster

I was a mere tourist with no part whatever in this great conflict; but it was my rare privilege, through an unusual train of circumstances, to witness the moving scenes that I have resolved to describe. In these pages I give only my personal impressions; so my readers should not look here for specific details, nor for information on strategic matters; these things have their place in other writings. — Henry Dunant

The national characteristics ... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro. — Lawrence Durrell

The poor are so common they're invisible, just part of the ambience of this place. I tuck a few soles under them as they sleep and walk off, feeling like a guilty tourist here for thrillseeking in a culture that's trying desperately to survive. Can shamanism help them? I wonder, as I make my way back to the hostel by moonlight. — Rak Razam

You're at this place filled with a bunch of people who want to better their lives, but they need the help of others if they want even the smallest chance to succeed. At this place they tell you their stories, and then they tell you their dreams. You are sitting there, a tourist among people who you do not belong around, but these people, they intrigue you. They show you what it means to rise when you are down. They show you that even the bloodiest battles with your mind can in fact be won. — M.B. Julien

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. — Paul Bowles

The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart? — Bill McKibben

They say you never forget your first glimpse of Gehenna. Over the tall buildings the sky swirls with orange and red, true titian, a feature of the unique atmosphere. Of course that same air would kill human beings; hence they built the entire city inside a dome. Eternal sunset, that's why the place is so wild. You know the feeling you get, just before full dark? Sundown makes you feel like the world burgeons with possibility, and that's Gehenna for you.
Like any other romantic notion, it's based on bullshit, of course. Gehenna isn't the land of eternal sunset and infinite potential. The gas in the atmosphere just makes it impossible to see the sun. — Ann Aguirre

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home. — Paul Bowles

Books have always been my escape - where I go to bury my nose, hone my senses, or play the emotional tourist in a world of my own choosing... Words are my best expressive tool, my favorite shield, my point of entry...When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter. If I could choose my favorite day, my favorite moment in some perfect dreamscape, I know exactly where I would be: stretched out in bed in the afternoon, knowing that the kids are taking a nap and I've got two more chapters left of some heartbreaking novel, the kind that messes you up for a week. — Jodie Foster

An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you. — Jamaica Kincaid

A tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. — Michael Lewis

I hope I'm not a tourist attraction - I'm sure that they come here really because St. Andrews is just amazing, a beautiful place. — Prince William

It is charming the way everyone in the South says, 'Come back.' This is the regulation farewell at gas stations, soda fountains, general stores, tourist camps. 'Come back,' they call, 'come back.' Do they feel marooned in one place, lost, needing to believe someone will return to share their exile on the similar main streets, in the varied but always new-looking land? — Martha Gellhorn

Remember our friend Mark?" Wylan winced. Let's say the mark is a tourist walking through the Barrel. He's heard it's a good place to get rolled, so he keeps patting his wallet, making sure it's there, congratulating himself on just how alert and cautious he;s being. No fool he. Of course every thime he pats his back pocket or the front of his coat, what is he doing? He's telliing every thief on the Stave exactly where he keeps his scrub."
"Saints," grumbled Nina. "I've probably done that."
"Everyone does," said Inej.
Jesper lifted a brow. "Not everyone."
"That's only because you never have anything in your wallet," Nina shot back.
"Mean."
"Factual."
"Facts are for the unimaginative," Jesper said with a dismissive wave. — Leigh Bardugo

But that is the way with killers, I suppose. What is the end of all innocence for you is just another Tuesday morning for them, and they walk off back to their planet of death giving no more thought to the world of the living that we would give to any other tourist destination: a place to be briefly visited and returned from with souvenirs and a haunting sensation that we could have paid less for them. — Chris Cleave

New York city wasn't yet the post-Giuliani, Bloomberg forever, Disneyland tourist attraction of today, trade-marked and policed to protect the visitors and tourism industry. It was still a place of diversity, where people lived their lives in vibrant communities and intact cultures. Young people could still move to New York City after or instead of high school or college and invent an identity, an art, a life. Times Square was still a bustling center of excitement, with sex work, "adult" movies, a variety of sins on sale, ways to make money for those down on their luck". — B. Ruby Rich

Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things. — Tahir Shah

Gloucester's not some chi-chi tourist town. It's a working-class seaport: a no-kidding-around down-and-dirty place. — Israel Horovitz

But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least. — Jenny Diski

David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali. — Douglas Adams

Many times when you're a tourist you can just stay on the surface and not really experience the place you're visiting, which will probably leave you disappointed. Everywhere has something interesting; it's just about being curious enough to find it and scratch where you have to scratch and stay longer and walk further. — Diego Luna

That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives - most natives in the world - cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go - so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself. — Jamaica Kincaid

I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk. — You Jin

I dream, one day the consciousness of the countries will be so high that they will be ashamed to place military on the international borders. All international borders will be place for the tourist, gardeners and cultural celebration. — Amit Ray

We visit the Launch Control building, where on one wall of the seventies-style lobby are hung the mission patches of every human spaceflight that has ever been launched from here, 149 to date. Beneath each mission patch is a small plaque showing the launch and landing dates. Two of them - Challenger's STS-51L and Columbia's STS-107 - are missing landing dates, because both of these missions ended in disasters that destroyed the orbiters and killed their crews. The blank spaces on the wall where those landing dates should have been are discolored from the touch of people's hands. This would be unremarkable if this place were a tourist attraction, or regularly open to the public. But with the rare exception of Family Days, this building is open only to people who work here. In other words, it's launch controllers, managers, and engineers who have been touching these empty spaces with their hands, on their way to and from doing their jobs. After — Margaret Lazarus Dean

This Osama bin Laden, now they say he has had plastic surgery. They say he sneaked across the border into Pakistan, which by the way is the place to go to have plastic surgery. He looks great. A tourist came up to him earlier this week and said, 'May I have your autograph, Mr. Hasselhoff?' — David Letterman

Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here. — Fran Lebowitz