“As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.
There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.
The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“A journey is a fragment of Hell.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Sometimes, I overheard my aunts discussing these blighted destinies; and Aunt Ruth would hug me, as if to forestall my following in their footsteps. Yet, from the way she lingered over such words as 'Xanadu' or 'Samarkand' or the 'wine-dark sea,' I think she also felt the trouble of the 'wanderer in her soul.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Fino a quando, Signore, fino a quando?... "Finché non siano devastate le città...". I Profeti confidavano in un Giorno della Restaurazione, in cui gli Ebrei sarebbero ritornati al frugale ascetismo della vita nomade.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“[...] la selezione naturale ci ha foggiati - dalla struttura delle cellule cerebrali alla struttura dell'alluce - per una vita di viaggi stagionali a piedi in una torrida distesa di rovi o di deserto.
Se era così, se la "patria" era il deserto, se i nostri istinti si erano forgiati nel deserto, per sopravvivere ai suoi rigori - allora era facile capire perché i pascoli più verdi ci vengono a noia, perché le ricchezze ci logorano e perchè l'immaginario uomo di Pascal considerava i suoi confortevoli alloggi una prigione.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Quali sono, quindi le prime impressioni che un bimbo nomade ha del mondo? Un capezzolo dondolante e una cascata d'oro.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Al termine di una notte di luna un cane ulula e poi ammutolisce. La luce del fuoco tremola e la sentinella sbadiglia. Un uomo vecchissimo passa silenzioso davanti alle tende, e saggia il terreno con un bastone per accertarsi di non inciampare nelle corde tese. Poi prosegue. La sua gente si trasferisce in una regione più verde. Mosè si reca all'appuntamento con gli sciacalli e gli avvoltoi.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Un marabutto smise di pregare per interrogarmi.
"Esiste un popolo chiamato mericani?" chiese.
"Sì".
"Dicono che hanno visitato la luna".
"E' vero".
"Sono blasfemi".”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Senza costrizione non si potrebbe fondare nessun insediamento. [...]”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensées, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room. Why, he asked, must a man with sufficient to live on feel drawn to divert himself on long sea voyages? To dwell in another town? To go off in search of a peppercorn? Or go off to war and break skulls? Later, on further reflection, having discovered the cause of our misfortunes, he wished to understand the reason for them, he found one very good reason: namely, the natural unhappiness of our weak mortal condition; so unhappy that when we gave to it all our attention, nothing could console us. One thing alone could alleviate our despair, and that was ‘distraction’ (divertissement): yet this was the worst of our misfortunes, for in distraction we were prevented from thinking about ourselves and were gradually brought to ruin.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“What am I doing here? Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul. Baudelaire, ‘Any Where Out of this World!”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer. Martin Heidegger, ‘Language”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
“Our fatal flaw, or Fall, he insisted, was to have developed ‘artificial weapons’ instead of natural ones. As a species, we thus lacked the instinctive inhibitions which prevented the ‘professional carnivores’ from murdering their fellows.”
― Bruce Chatwin, quote from The Songlines
Bruce Chatwin
Born place: in Sheffield, The United Kingdom
Born date May 13, 1940
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“probably no one would have ever even heard of a yak if it hadn't been about the only animal that began with a y.”
― Suzanne Collins, quote from Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods
“Good is to be found neither in the sermons of religious teachers and prophets, nor in the teachings of sociologists and popular leaders, nor in the ethical systems of philosophers... And yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day's work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.
Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital 'G', there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother.
The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.
But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.
Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium.”
― Vasily Grossman, quote from Life and Fate
“The only time you were safe was when you were dead.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
“Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life; and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital, Vol 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
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