Generally speaking, the length and grandness of a hotel’s name are an exact opposite reflection of its quality. Thus the hotel Central will prove to be a clean, pleasant place in a good part of town, and the Hotel Royal Majestic-Fantastic will be a fleabag next to a topless bowling alley.

Miss Piggy

 

Companions: if you’re travelling alone, beware of seatmates who by way of starting conversation make remarks like, ‘I just have to talk to someone-my teeth are spying on me’ or ‘Did you know that squirrels are the devil’s oven mitts?’

Miss Piggy

 

Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not want to hear what he has seen in Hong Kong.

Vita Sackville-West

 

Never trust anything you read in a travel article. Travel articles appear in publications that sell large, expensive advertisements to tourism-related industries, and these industries do not wish to see articles with headlines like: FLORIDA: DON’T BOTHER.

Dave Barry

 

There was a road ran past our house 

Too lovely to explore.

I asked my mother once – she said

That if you followed where it led

It brought you to the milk-man’s door.

(That’s why I haven’t traveled more.)

            Edna St. Vincent Millay, “The Unexplorer”

 

The faster and more widely we travel, the more we begin to doubt the value of travel itself, to suspect that the things we most admire are best appreciated and preserved through fixity rather than movement.

Ian Ousby

 

I have recently been all round the world and have formed a poor opinion of it.

Sir Thomas Beecham

 

Ay, now I am in Arden; the more fool I. When I was at home I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.                                              

Shakespeare

 

If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are “no account,” go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them–if the people you go among suffer by the operation.

Mark Twain

 

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Oscar Wilde