“When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.”

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading.”

“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

“the truth is, I am heartily sick of this life & of the nineteenth century in general. (I am convinced that every thing is going wrong.)”

“I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.”

“She had her head in a book. Like me she preferred reading about travel to actually traveling; it was so much more comfortable.”