Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

..luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of travelling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living – indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

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.

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.

Borges, who said, “Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve.

Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people’s.

As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again.

An aimless joy is a pure joy,” I said, quoting Yeats.

most of the portraits of Niyazov all over Turkmenistan showed him smiling, though he never looked less reliable, or less amused, than when he was smiling. His smile – and this may be true of all political leaders – was his most sinister feature.

A viagem é muito mais recompensadora quando deixa de ter que ver com a nossa chegada a um destino e se torna indistinguível de vivermos a nossa vida.

Of course, it’s much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things,

I can tell that I am growing old,” says the narrator in Borges’s story “The Congress.” “One unmistakable sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it—it’s little more than timid variations on what’s already been.

serious business in Teeflees, because I had no business at all. This was one of those times when I was reminded again of how travel was a bumming evasion, a cheap excuse for intruding upon other people’s privacy.

I hate being read to. I hate the pauses. I hate the stammers and mispronunciations. Most of all I hate the slowness of it. I can read quickly and efficiently, and cannot stand someone taking charge and denying me the pleasure of reading the damned thing myself.

The humane aspects of Zoroastrianism probably accounted for its diminution as a faith, if not its failure. A religion needs harshness and hokum to succeed, and all Zarathustra taught was understanding the earthly elements, the turn of the year, the one God.

And why was I still here? I felt I was killing time, especially in Russia, which, in spite of all the talk of change and reform, seemed exactly the same place as it had ever been: a pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police.

Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned—volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So—writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life,