Bruce Chatwin Quotes

Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.

Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.

To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.

I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land."

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

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'.

Music… is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.

When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.

Because they knew each other's thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking.

A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will.

And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.

The song and the land are one.

For life is a journey through a wilderness

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.

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.

As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.

I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed's dictum, 'A journey is a fragment of Hell.'

I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

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.

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.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.

Anything was better than to be loved for one's things.

I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.

Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber.

Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security.

A journey is a fragment of Hell.

The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?

'I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China, and continue my profession.' 'As sanitary engineer?' 'No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries of the world.'

And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.

It's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home.