Travel Memoir Quotes & Sayings

That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand. — Christopher Isherwood

I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself. — Gerry Abbey

He was lonely. I could see that. He was working his butt off-and mine, too-in the hope that a million rupees might sort out his sex life. I prayed to Buddha he would be successful. If he didn't get some action soon, I doubted I would, either. — Frank Kusy

My motto? Don't trust someone who is just as cagey as yourself."
"What kind of detective are you?" "A lousy one and proud of it. I write, remember?"
She looked down at her hand & laughed. "Berretta doesn't make lighters." "Why I was a writer! My life revolved around fiction. I could make something up"
"She looked down at her hand & laughed. "Berretta doesn't make lighters."
"So they're not Tolstoy, they're a little shorter ... Okay, okay a lot. Go ahead, read my mystery series anyway."
"A detective has their boundaries especially me. So mine shifted occasionally ... okay a lot"
"Beat it, Buster. My temper and this mace have a hair trigger."
"Interference could be lethal." I got right up in his face, hissing, "Don't push me, I'm hormonal."
I'm not really a lousy detective, just rough around the edges. — Peggy A. Edelheit

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death. — Craig Briggs

As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn't even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects. — Gerry Abbey

Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years. — Larry McMurtry

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide. — Gerry Abbey

The website increases my excitement when I read, "Hark, the pies are calling!" My excitement is short-lived, however. I read the page again and realize that it is "pipes" that are calling, not "pies" as I had hoped. I am disappointed. I personally react better to the call of pies. — Aefa Mulholland

As I travelled south through Europe everything got bigger. This applied to nice things like fruit-the nectarines and tomatoes were about six times as large in Greece as they were in Britain for example. But the principle also applied to unpleasant things, like spiders, and worms, and all other nameless and horrifying insects and arachnids of Greece. — Margaret Eleanor Leigh

Some flowers need flames to find their way into this world. — Cindy Campopiano

My meal arrived. It was a bowl of tepid, green curried water with two spinach leaves floating in it. The waiter called it 'vegetable soup'. I called it inedible slop. — Frank Kusy

Walk your own path and be yourself — Joanne Nussbaum

Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile 'cigarette and sweets' stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway. — Jennifer S. Alderson

Alone, I relished the bird songs, the drone of hushed conversation from neighboring tables, and the gentle lapping of waves sliding on the shore.

I didn't feel the passage of time. There was no destination propelling me forward, no past and no future. Each glorious moment was replaced by the next. — Marilyn Berman

Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs. — Cheryl Strayed

Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. — Martha Barron Barrett

He wasn't a great man, but he had a great life. — Jeffrey Rasley

The whole world is like an opened candy jar, and we're plunging in for the best treats — Vicki Alayne Bradley

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected. — William Least Heat-Moon

I stood in the library admiring the huge book collection. There was something inherently calming about being surrounded by books, even their smell and texture was comforting. — Saffron Mello Castro

I don't think you can take a whole genre of very popular books and say, "This is all trash!" When we read a memoir that isn't by a celebrity, we feel like we're about to go on a journey and we don't know where the journey will lead. But when we read a memoir by a celebrity we feel like we already know the journey and we just want to travel it. — Hilary Liftin

And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade. — Cheryl Strayed

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone. — Frances Mayes

The last time I'd spoken French I was twelve years old; before I reached my thirteenth birthday the teacher had correctly steered me into woodwork classes. — Craig Briggs

After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one's buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable seats-whether in buses our trains, or restaurants or cinemas. There is no such thing as a padded seat in the whole country. — Frank Kusy

Just because I am paranoid does not mean that someone is not out to get me — Don Darkes

Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer! — Gerry Abbey

Isn't that the point, to enjoy our lives no matter what? — Jude Arnold

I ended up in the back seat of a chicken truck's cab heading through beautiful scenery and disastrous roads to my hotel. About an hour later, we stopped to sell a few hundred of the chickens to a butcher shop. — Jennifer S. Alderson

Each person in the group said something except for me. My silence became noticed. About halfway through the meeting I started to think, I've got to talk. Today, I've got to talk. Fear racked me so bad that sweat ran down my sides. I thought, After the curly-haired woman stops talking I'll raise my hand. A man with a cocky smile told the curly woman that her story was nothing compared to his, he'd been passed out cold from heroin and God knows what, and I wanted to tell him to quit glorifying hinself. I was just about to say the words, a few faces turned toward me as if they could sense my imminent speech, when a man across the circle interrupted.
The opportunity passed; what I wanted to say wouldn't fit now. I tilted on the back two legs of the chair and waited for my desire to speak and be noticed and be part of the group to travel back through my nervous system. Up the synapses condemnation rushed: Why couldn't I spit something out like a normal person? — Daphne Scholinski

There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world. — Gerry Abbey

I would advise the curious reader to keep in mind the old adage "truth is stranger than fiction." Expect the most outlandish, fantastic and unbelievable elements of this story to be true, and the more low-key elements to be fudged. — Dan Grajek

Being a maverick traveller, one would like to place oneself in the place of a local; just listen without judgement. — Mary Jane Walker

It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable. — Gerry Abbey

Expectation is the dirtiest word in a traveler's vocabulary. — John Early

As Rosa rolled the hard boiled egg across my forehead I wasn't as disturbed as you might think, even though I was sitting on a plastic table in a five star hotel bathroom in my underwear, being chattered at in Spanish by a lady I'd met only the day before in the herb and flower market. The truth is, I've probably done stranger things in hotel bathrooms. — Becky Wicks

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement. — William Least Heat-Moon

I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Damoder climbed slowly to his feet. 'Buy lot!' he wheedled, 'I am poor man. I sell you cheap. I am bank-Rupert! Apparently the only things that could save him from bank-rupertcy were our dollars. — Frank Kusy

The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I'm surprised there weren't more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call 'passing') by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle. — Jennifer S. Alderson

The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead. — Mary Karr

I want my heart to be the thin place. I don't want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my fragile, hurting heart, to recognize fleeting kairos, eternal moments as they pass. I want to be my own mountain and my own retreat. — Anna White

My professional life had started and here I was at a professional dinner full of uninhibited drinking. — Gerry Abbey

Whatever you believe, and however, each of us deals with these events in our lives, one thing is for certain the truism, time is a great healer, is of no consolation at that moment of intense, all-consuming grief.

From GLASS HALF FULL — Sarah Jane Butfield