Top 35 Bruce Chatwin Quotes
#1. When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.
Bruce Chatwin
#3. Because they knew each other's thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking.
Bruce Chatwin
#4. The real home of man is not his house but the road. Life itself is a travel that has to be done by foot.
Bruce Chatwin
#5. 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.
Bruce Chatwin
#6. 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.
Bruce Chatwin
#7. As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.
Bruce Chatwin
#8. You're saying that man "makes" his territory by naming the "things" in it?
Bruce Chatwin
#9. Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.
Bruce Chatwin
#10. 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.
Bruce Chatwin
#11. To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe
Bruce Chatwin
#12. Music ... is a memory bank for finding one's way about the world.
Bruce Chatwin
#13. I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.
Bruce Chatwin
#14. [ ... ] 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 in the world.
Bruce Chatwin
#16. 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.
Bruce Chatwin
#17. Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security.
Bruce Chatwin
#18. And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.
Bruce Chatwin
#19. 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.
Bruce Chatwin
#20. 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?
Bruce Chatwin
#21. As the young have discovered, the secret divinity of the twentieth century is Science. But Science is incapable of forming character. The more people talk of human sciences, the less effect human sciences have on man.
Bruce Chatwin
#22. I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.
Bruce Chatwin
#24. 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.'
Bruce Chatwin
#25. 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.
Bruce Chatwin
#26. 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.
Bruce Chatwin
#27. Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.
Bruce Chatwin
#29. Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.
Bruce Chatwin
#31. Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder.
Bruce Chatwin
#32. Anything was better than to be loved for one's things.
Bruce Chatwin
#33. And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.
Bruce Chatwin
#34. 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.
Bruce Chatwin
#35. 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.
Bruce Chatwin
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