To move, to breathe, to fly, to float
To gain all while you give
To roam the roads of lands remote
To travel is to live
--Hans Christian Anderson

“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, to bear witness to the consequences , tragic or comic, of people possessed by the narcissism of minor differences.” --Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel (2010)

“All of which is a roundabout way of saying that most travel stories are self-referential at a certain level—and this is not a bad thing. When you enter into an experience with the intention of writing about it, you tend to travel the world more creatively and observe it more thoughtfully.” --Rolf Potts, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There (2009)

“I was so stimulated by the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of each place that I didn’t need anything else to entertain myself.” --Kyle Barraclough

"I lived abroad before email and internet connectivity and felt content to absorb the local customs and forms of entertainment, and to write and type letters and send them in the post and wait for a response just like anyone else at the time. It’s all a matter of what you are used to, and what limitations you are able to accept. There did come a point when the urge to keep American ties became less and less the norm, and the desire to create bonds with the native culture became more the norm. It’s a matter of length of exposure. If you have a temporary mindset to your travels, you’ll never embrace it. One must think of travel as being bigger than ‘me.’” –-Roger Merritt (2010)

"All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder." -–Pico Iyer

“'You must leave your country in order to understand it.' Surely some wise man said that once, but I can’t seem to find the person to attribute it to. I’ve searched but I can’t find a reference to it. Could it be my quote? I don’t know, but I do believe it. I believe that you can’t fully understand your home until you leave it. You must see other places, evaluate them, compare them to home, and see how other people critique your home. That’s one of the many reasons I live to travel." --Roger Merritt (2010)

"I think travel just really wakes me up. It puts me in a state of hyper-awareness that’s hard to get to in daily life. I’m so intrigued by other cultures—when I’m traveling away from home I get more insight into my own life and culture as well