Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence.
In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.
Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing.
Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.
Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.
People will tell you, “What’s the use? What’s the point of reading novels and poetry?” They’ll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized.
One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I’ll tell you the worst one. People can’t stand to be alone. Can’t tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say ‘Please call me up!’ It’s sick. People hate their own company – they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that’s a clue to the whole thing...
One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South.” What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia.
So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don’t bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.
The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone ‘on safari’ is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.
Borges, who said, “Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve.
But what I liked in Aberdeen was what I liked generally in Britain: the bread, the fish, the cheese, the flower gardens, the apples. the clouds, the newspapers, the beer, the wollen cloth, the radio programmes, the parks, the Indian restaurants and amateur dramatics, the postal service, the fresh vegetables, the trains, and the modesty and truthfulness of people.
To travel unconnected, away from anyone’s gaze or reach, is bliss.
If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.
We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.
A reader meeting another reader is an encounter of kindred spirits. The pleasure of such a joyous event is impossible to describe to a nonreader, and why would I bother? But you, with this book in your hand, are familiar with the phenomenon, and so it is not necessary.
January snow lay thick on the ground – crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning.
Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial.
Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of writing – groping around in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness.