Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In India everything has a use and a value.
A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.
A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it.
With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.
Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.
Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent
Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession.
A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you.
Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.
In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.
There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.
The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.
The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.
There’s nothing quite like a good quest for getting your blood pumping.
On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.
On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.
To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path
My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.
One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.
Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.
The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.
I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.
Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.
In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.
Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does.
For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.
Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones.
Respect was one thing. Survival was another. It was important that I kept my priorities in the right order.
Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.
Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.
The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation.
Through bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.
It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.
The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study's sake. There's no right or wrong, no pass or fail.
Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.
As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.
In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that i will come to no harm.
For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.
There comes a stage at which a man would rather die cleanly by a bullet than by the unknown terror of the phantom in the forest.
The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.
Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.
In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough.
I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.
If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
The model of publishing is changing and its happening right now, but most publishers are so frightened, they just dont know how to embrace it.
Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.
Stories are not like the real world; they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside.
The rain of Madre de Dios is similar to that of the Amazon, but there is a petrifying aspect to it, as if it seeks to wound rather than to nurture.