"We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to ..."
- Pico Iyer
"Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger."
"One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they som..."
"... a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing."
"Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice"
"And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is wh..."
"...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the wi..."
"Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed."
"You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airpo..."
"Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come."