“Have you ever been at a point that you don't know what to say? But yet you came up with this crazy idea to type this.”

“With your permission you give us more information about you, your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less guess what you're thinking about.”

“But the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else, cannot be given to the reader through factual description. And maybe not at all. You have to find your own secret images. The slow fall of a coin into the gorge with the sun catching the copper only for a moment, and the fall into nothing says more about a sense of place than three pages of restaurant and hotel descriptions...”

“Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.”

“When you travel you become invisible if you want. I do want. I like to be the observer. What makes these people who they are Could I feel at home here No one expects you to have the stack of papers back by Tuesday or to check messages or to fertilize the geraniums or to sit full of dread in the waiting room at the protologist’s office. When travelling you have the delectable possibility of not understanding a word of what is said to you. Language becomes simply a musical background for watching bicycles zoom along a canal calling for nothing from you. Even better if you speak the language you catch nuances and make more contact with people. Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full of choice free to visit the stately pleasure domes make love in the morning sketch a bell tower read a history of Byzantium stare for one hour at the face of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna dei fusi. You open as in childhood and – for a time – receive this world. There’s the visceral aspect too – the huntress who is free. Free to go Free to return home bringing memories to lay on the hearth.”

“Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.”

“One of those flash epiphanies of travel, the realization that worlds you'd love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about. The breeze lifting a blue curtain in a doorway billows just the same whether you are lucky enough to observe it or not. Travel gives such jolts. I could live in this town, so how is it that I've never been here before today?”