Bruce Chatwin Quotes

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.

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

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'.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.