Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, but would you want to? Whether expatriates or nomads, many of our great writers and thinkers were made by travel. Here are some of their notes on the journey, both inner and outer.
God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.
—Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
—George Bernard Shaw, Widowers’ Houses
I’m from Texas, and one of the reasons I like Texas is because there’s no one in control.
—Willie Nelson, interview, Time magazine
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
—Henry Adams, The Perfection of Human Society
Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.
—Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, as quoted in The Tao of Travel, Paul Theroux
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
—Aldous Huxley, “The Rest Is Silence”
