Quotes & Sayings About Travelers

I'm deeply interested in the photograph as a record of an encounter and enjoy putting myself in a timeline of image-makers, alongside other travelers, such as anthropologists, colonists, missionaries, even tourists. I do that to emphasize subjectivity, rather than privilege any single perspective - I see myself as only one of many storytellers. — Susan Meiselas

Find your path in life and travel on it. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It is my hope that this book will help to demystify the origins of travel writing and show that when thousands of travelers follow a guidebook word-for-word, recommendation-for-recommendation, it not only harms contemporary international travel but can also do serious harm to places in developing countries. — Thomas Kohnstamm

In this world we're all travelers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us; we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travelers. — Fernando Pessoa

Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present. — Ellen Goodman

We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays "Happy Birthday" is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind. — Eric Hansen

Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies. — Steven Johnson

It wasn't the high thin mountain air that took our breath away. Those stone steps led us up to a place unlike any other on earth. We were overcome by the vision spread out before us; a purely mystical embodiment of space, time, setting, and silence. Up here the noise of our fellow travelers was strangely absent, muffled beneath a mantle of quiet that permeated the mountaintop city. No one was immune. In that first view, in that first moment, every visitor absorbed the essence of Machu Picchu in reverent stillness. — George L. Ayers

Now then, Mr. Crab," said the zebra, "here are the people I told you about; and they know more than you do, who live in a pool, and more than I do, who live in a forest. For they have been travelers all over the world, and know every part of it."
"There's more of the world than Oz," declared the crab, in a stubborn voice.
"That is true," said Dorothy; "but I used to live in Kansas, in the United States, and I've been to California and to Australia
and so has Uncle Henry."
"For my part," added the Shaggy Man, "I've been to Mexico and Boston and many other foreign countries."
"And I," said the Wizard, "have been to Europe and Ireland."
"So you see," continued the zebra, addressing the crab, "here are people of real consequence, who know what they are talking about. — L. Frank Baum

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. — Paul Theroux

I'm not sure that religion was constructed with time travelers in mind." Buck's brows rose at that. "Constructed?" he echoed, surprised. "Who builds God? — Diana Gabaldon

People, when they first come to America, whether as travelers or settlers, become aware of a new and agreeable feeling: that the whole country is their oyster. — Alistair Cooke

People should be entrusted with their own lives. People must be independent in every respect. No one should own anything. Property should be free like people are. The roads should not belong to any one person, in order to stop someone from collecting tolls from travelers. A priest shouldn't take a toll for prayers. A farmhand shouldn't take a toll for the fruits of the earth. The phone company shouldn't take a toll for conversations. Totally free of charge, like the fetus's time inside the mother continues to be after its birth. — Kristin Omarsdottir

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life. — Salman Rushdie

And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys. — Cormac McCarthy

Long voyages often lose themselves.
Mam?
You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all. Listen to the corridos of the country. They will tell you. Then you will see in your own life what is the cost of things. Perhaps it is true that nothing is hidden. Yet many do not wish to see what lies before them in plain sight. You will see. The shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that wears the shape but only the one. And every voyage begun upon it will be completed. Whether horses are found or not. — Cormac McCarthy

Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers. — Truman Capote

Other relaxations are peculiar to certain times, places and stages of life, but the study of letters is the nourishment of our youth, and the joy of our old age. They throw an additional splendor on prosperity, and are the resource and consolation of adversity; they delight at home, and are no embarrassment abroad; in short, they are company to us at night, our fellow travelers on a journey, and attendants in our rural recesses. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The pro skaters I know are responsible members of society. Many of them are fathers, homeowners, world travelers and successful entrepreneurs. Their hairdos and tattoos are simply part of our culture, even when they raise eyebrows during PTA meetings. — Tony Hawk

Who knows, maybe one day there will no longer be Literature. Instead there will be literary web sites. Like those stars, still shining but long dead, the web sites will testify to the existence of past writers. There will be quotes, fragments of texts, which prove that there used to be complete texts once. Instead of readers there will be cyber space travelers who will stumble upon the websites by chance and stop for a moment to gaze at them. How they will read them? Like hieroglyphs? As we read the instructions for a dishwasher today? Or like remnants of a strange communication that meant something in the past, and was called Literature? — Dubravka Ugresic

We travelers slept under the stars once more. — Julie Berry

Travelers aren't found. They're called. — Chess Desalls

But I definitely see us playing a major role in St. Louis in the years to come. We already provide service to 95 percent of the markets St. Louis travelers visit the most. And we're adding capacity in some of the most important markets. — Gerard Arpey

The greatest travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world; they have trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and redemption. — Carlo Levi

When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death. — Clarence Darrow

In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.
— Rory Stewart

We all are travelers traveling on a very big spaceship called Earth. Let's not ruin the engines of our very own spaceship in the name of development. — Mohith Agadi

To the tourist, travel is a means to an end; to the traveler, it's an end in itself. — Marty Rubin

What does it matter if a few barking dogs snap at the heels of the weary travelers? ... The caravan moves on — Bruce R. McConkie

Travelers we are, in this journey of memory. Aboard together we might, and get off at different times.

Still, memory lingers. — Anonymous

We all walk in a land of dreams. For what are we but atoms and hope, a handful of stardust and sinew? We are weary travelers trying to find our way home on a road that never ends. Am I a part of your dream? or are you but a part of mine? — Libba Bray

It has already been noticed that the Nazis were not simple nationalists. Their nationalist propaganda was directed toward their fellow-travelers and not their convinced members; the latter, on the contrary, were never allowed to lose sight of a consistently supranational approach to politics. Nazi "nationalism" had more than one aspect in common with the recent nationalistic propaganda in the Soviet Union, which is also used only to feed the prejudices of the masses. The Nazis had a genuine and never revoked contempt for the narrowness of nationalism, the provincialism of the nation-state, and they repeated time and again that their "movement," international in scope like the Bolshevik movement, was more important to them than any state, which would necessarily be bound to a specific territory. And — Hannah Arendt

All serious travelers arrive at this doubting, why-bother juncture, stalling on the road, sometime or other. — Paul Theroux

This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock. — Cynthia Ozick

Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking. — Antonio Machado

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all. — Cormac McCarthy

We all yearn to fly. We are creatures of longing. We do not need to [physically fly] to be airborne. What I call the aerial instinct-the drive to transcend our present condition- is the defining characteristic of a human being. We are restless animals, eternal travelers who are forever in the process of becoming. Consciousness itself is a flight from the here and now to the beyond. Our reach always exceeds our grasp, which is what Heaven is for ... — Sam Keen

I think that people with autism are born outside the regime of civilization. Sure, this is just my own made-up theory, but I think that, as a result of all the killings in the world and the selfish planet-wrecking that humanity has committed, a deep sense of crisis exists. Autism has somehow arisen out of this. Although people with autism look like other people physically, we are in fact very different in many ways. We are more like travelers from the distant, distant past. And if, by our being here, we could help the people of the world remember what truly matters for the Earth, that would give us a quiet pleasure. — Naoki Higashida

And I'll be sworn 'tis true. Travelers ne'er did lie,
Though fools at home condemn 'em.
---Antonio
(Act III, scene 3, lines 26-27.) — William Shakespeare

One of the most connective things we can do for ourselves, is to become world travelers of our own internal landscapes. What i love about creating art, is the excitement of turning that landscape inside out for all to see. And the kind of courage that takes, when i don't know what the outcome will be ... — Jaeda DeWalt

Woe to those who spare no expense. I should know, since these are travelers who scorn AWAP for holidays in "foreign" countries so comfortable they qualify as near death experiences. — Lionel Shriver

I like travelers, but I don't like tourists. The difference is that travelers don't shop and they don't play golf. — Tom Robbins

After seeing the various fantastic sights, a visitor to Panorama Island would have had to gasp in amazement at this unsurpassable view. He would have had the impression that the entire island was a rose floating on the vast ocean and that the giant scarlet flower of an opium dream was conversing on an equal footing with the sun in the sky, just the two of them. What kind of strange beauty had that incomparable simplicity and grandeur created? Some travelers might have recalled the world of myth that their distant ancestors had seen. . . .

How can the author describe the madness and debauchery, the pleasures of revelry and drunkenness, the numberless games of life and death that were played day and night on that magnificent stage? You readers might find something that resembled it, in part, in your most fantastic, bloodiest, and most beautiful nightmares. — Rampo Edogawa

Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign. — Margaret Atwood

Remember we are all but travelers here. — Mary MacKillop

We will have a border that is open for business, open for tourism, open for legitimate travelers; but that is closed to terrorists and drug pushers and smugglers and others who seek to break the law. — Paul Cellucci

As part of our layered approach, we have expedited the deployment of new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) units to help detect concealed metallic and non-metallic threats on passengers. These machines are now in use at airports nationwide, and the vast majority of travelers say they prefer this technology to alternative screening measures. — Janet Napolitano

There is no such thing as a boring person: everyone has stories and insights worth sharing. While on the road, we let our phones or laptops take up our attention. By doing that, we might miss out on the chance to learn and absorb ideas and inspiration from an unexpected source: our fellow travelers. — Richard Branson

We are two travelers, Roger and I. Roger's my dog-come here, you scamp! Jump for the gentleman-mind your eye! Over the table,-look out for the lamp! The rogue is growing a little old; Five years we've tramped through wind and weather, And slept out-doors when nights were cold, And ate and drank and starved together. — John Townsend Trowbridge

We are only here below as in an inn on a journey. Let us, then have the feelings of travelers. We should think a man very strange who attached himself much to his inn. The wise Christian will not do this. — Eugenie De Guerin

Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries - but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was. — Ransom Riggs

Taking Root

I am no stranger to roots. In third grade, I punctured
a sweet potato's middle with toothpicks, suspended
it halfway in a cup of water until sprout-like whiskers

swam along its bottom. On day nine leaves crowned it.
I scooped out soil with my hands and buried it up
to its neck. I've laid down my own in places

where corn and tomatoes grow in vacant lots,
where cilantro and basil thrive on window sills
and in cities balanced on ancestor's bones.

Roots are hardy travelers, adaptable: they float
on water, cohere to wood, burrow deep beneath
foundations, challenge floorboards.

from Second Skin — Diana Anhalt

I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing - of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily satisfied, and resume my daily tasks. — Patti Smith

I like to think that Einstein would look at string theory's journey and smile, enjoying the theory's remarkable geometrical features while feeling kinship with fellow travelers on the long and winding road toward unification. — Brian Greene

You ... are stones of the temple of the Father, prepared for the Father's building, and drawn up on high by the instrument of Jesus Christ, which is the Cross (cf. Jn. 12:32), making use of the Holy Spirit as a rope, while your faith was the means by which you ascended, and your love the way which led up to God. You, therefore, as well as all your fellow-travelers, are God-bearers, temple-bearers, Christ-bearers, bearers of holiness, adorned in all respects with the commandments of Jesus Christ. — Ignatius Of Antioch

And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts. — Emma Donoghue

Dream-travelers, there is no path, paths are made by dreaming. — Antonio Machado

Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

But, come to think of it, there was no need to wait. Time travelers don't have to wait for anybody. — Jack McDevitt

Face the hard questions that life requires you to ask. Gather with other travelers on the narrow road, pilgrims who acknowledge their confusion and feel their fears. Then, together, live those questions in My Presence. — Larry Crabb

Love and worry. They went hand in hand. Fellow travelers. — Louise Penny

Perhaps it was Lord Darion," Rolfe said at last, and Emma sagged with relief.
"Lord Darion?" Blake stared at him in confusion. "I have not heard of him. Does he have a keep around here?"
Emma glanced over her shoulder to see her cousin shake his head. There was a sparkle of mischief in his eyes as he met hers. "Nay.Darion is a spirit of the woods.And a defender of the weak. He has been known to protect unwary travelers who are set upon ... always with a bow and arrow."
"Have you seen this Darion?"
"Oh,aye.Lord Darion saved my life a time or two.The first time I was a mere boy. — Lynsay Sands

Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries. — Ron Paul

Travelers perceptions do not always reflect the reality of a situation, and ignorance is costing the industry billions. — Paul Dowling

When there was a summer of bad bush fires, all that was left of the house was the brick recess that had held the stove and open fire. Lush rains followed, and with the earth nourished by the ashes, a pine near the front, surviving the holocaust, gave birth to a grove of deep green trees, turning the old tumbledown house into an oasis, causing the travelers to exclaim at the beauty and watch with excitement for the village coming up, perhaps as a peaceful and pretty as the trees. — Olga Masters

Only the traveler knows the details of the journey. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Love is a travel. All travelers whether they want or not are changed. No one can travel into love and remain the same. — Shams Tabrizi

To this end, we should help and support one another and strive for peace and union among ourselves. This is the wine that cheers and strengthens travelers along the narrow path of Jesus Christ. — Vincent De Paul

Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin? — Cormac McCarthy

The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind on God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God. "When I awake, I am still with thee" (Psalm 139:18). The thoughts are as travelers in the mind. David's thoughts kept heaven-road. "I am still with Thee." God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart. By this we may test our love to God. What are our thoughts most upon? Can we say we are ravished with delight when we think on God? Have our thoughts got wings? Are they fled aloft? Do we contemplate Christ and glory? ... A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge. — Dallas Willard

Utrip makes it easy for travelers to experience the destination highlights that most interest them, be it food, art or history. Just like a culinary experience, every palate is different, and Utrip is all about personalizing travel for their users. — Tom Douglas

As we meet and touch, each day, The many travelers on our way, Let every such brief contact be A glorious, helpful minister. — Sarah Chauncey Woolsey

Even great travelers of the inner world have got stuck in beautiful experiences, and have become identified with those experiences, thinking, "I have found myself." They have stopped before reaching the final stage where all experiences disappear. Enlightenment is not an experience. — Rajneesh

We cannot truly love God if we do not love our fellow travelers on this mortal journey. — Thomas S. Monson

Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort....My only boast in travel is my effort... — Paul Theroux

If companionship is a mandate for all of our experiences, then we will miss out on many of life's blessings. — Gina Greenlee

Travelers describe a tree in the island of Java whose pestiferous exhalations blight every tiny blade of grass within the compass of its shade. So it is with despotism. — Giovanni Ruffini

Travelers never did lie, though fools at home condemn them. — William Shakespeare

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners. — Mason Cooley

Vanity is a confounded donkey, very apt to put his head between his legs, and chuck us over; but pride is a fine horse, that will carry us over the ground, and enable us to distance our fellow-travelers. — Frederick Marryat

Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing - of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily — Patti Smith

The stigma for bus travel has evaporated," says Joseph P. Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University. "People are willing to endure a longer commute for a mobile office benefit." His research found that nearly 60 percent of discount bus travelers used a personal electronic device en route in 2014, up from 46 percent a year earlier, while the numbers held steady at 52 percent for Amtrak and 35 percent for the airlines. The study did not include a separate category for luxury buses. — Anonymous

Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea and drive there in the first of the summer - with the dog and cat, the children, and the cook - arriving at a strange place a little before dark. The journey to the sea has its ceremonious excitements, it has gone on for so many years now, and there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers - travelers, at least, with a traveler's acuteness of feeling." --from ""The Seaside Houses — John Cheever

You run back and forth listening for unusual events,
peering into the faces of travelers.
"Why are you looking at me like a madman?"
I have lost a friend. Please forgive me. — Rumi

There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose
a gleaming, round saucer
over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul
or, as a new moon, silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. THAT moon. — Haruki Murakami

A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead. — Lemony Snicket

There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed at every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains. It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states. — John Steinbeck

I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. I can only love you all, poor fellow travelers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry. My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and live with you all, in His love. — Dorothy Day

The Saint Bernards work best in teams of at least three dogs. They are sent out on patrols following storms, and they wander the paths looking for stranded travelers. If they come upon a victim, two dogs lie down beside the person to keep him warm; one of the two licks his face to stimulate him back to consciousness. Meanwhile, another dog will have already started back to the hospice to sound the alarm. — Stanley Coren

We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity. — Mark Twain

There was something much greater she needed to feed her soul, and perhaps one day soon she would go ... — Danielle Steel

From the vantage point of my warm, comfortable spot on mother earth, I could see off into infinite space and the eternity of time. In just a few hours, I thought, some of us are going to make that leap into eternity. And I will be one of the instruments of that voyage. I may also be one of the travelers....It's going to happen sooner or later. But if today is my day-I'm going to have a cup of coffee first. — Eric L. Haney

Australia's arid western region, from the town of Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean coast, is a beautiful, haunting, but largely empty land. Dominated by the harsh, almost uninhabited Great Sandy and Gibson deserts, the region is known only to Australian Aborigines, a handful of white settlers, and the few travelers who motor across it. — Robyn Davidson

They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey. — Cormac McCarthy

Gastronomers of the year 1825, who find sateity in the lap of abundance, and dream of some newly-made dishes, you will not enjoy the discoveries which science has in store for the year 1900, such as foods drawn from the mineral kingdom, liqueurs produced by the pressure of a hundred atmospheres; you will never see the importations which travelers yet unborn will bring to you from that half of the globe which has still to be discovered or explored. How I pity you! — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Stabbings, shooting, rapes, homicides -- the denizens of places like the Elk brought those crimes along with them the way ordinary travelers carried luggage. — Linda Fairstein

Adolescents are travelers, far from home with no native land, neither children nor adults. They are jet-setters who fly from one country to another with amazing speed. Sometimes they are four years old, an hour later they are twenty-five. They don't really fit anywhere. There's a yearning for place, a search for solid ground. — Mary Pipher

The airport in Sofia was a tiny place; I'd expected a palace of modern communism, but we descended to a modest area of tarmac and strolled across it with the other travelers. Nearly all of them were Bulgarian,
I decided, trying to catch something of their conversations. They were
handsome people, some of them strikingly so, and their faces varied
from the dark-eyed pale Slav to a Middle-Eastern bronze, a kaleidoscope
of rich hues and shaggy black eyebrows, noses long and flaring, or
aquiline, or deeply hooked, young women with curly black hair and noble
foreheads, and energetic old men with few teeth. They smiled or laughed and talked eagerly with one another; one tall man gesticulated to his companion with a folded newspaper. Their clothes were distinctly not Western, although I would have been hard put to say what it was about the cuts of suits and skirts, the heavy shoes and dark hats, that was unfamiliar to me. — Elizabeth Kostova

We remained travelers, enclosed in the self, capable, possibly, of transforming ourselves in contact with alterity, but certainly not of experiencing it profoundly. We are spies, we make the rapid, furtive contact of spies. When — Mathias Enard