Colin Thubron Quotes

#1. A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort

Colin Thubron

#2. Just as the roads at Moscow's heart flow out in concentric ripples from the Kremlin, so this tension too seems to radiate from those secret and formidable walls, lapping outward to the suburbs and to the farthest confines of the Soviet Union itself, in ever-weakening but pervasive rings.

Colin Thubron

#3. Between valleys I took the stone stairways laid down by villages, and would glimpse the farmers toiling up below me in crocodiles of decorated straw hats, or waiting in curiosity above.

Colin Thubron

#4. Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken

Colin Thubron

#5. Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here ... and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world ...

Colin Thubron

#6. The attributes you need to be a travel writer are somewhat contradictory. For travel you need to be tough and resilient and to write you must be sensitive and sympathetic.

Colin Thubron

#7. mountains, and cried: 'That is the tomb of Kochoi, the companion of Manas!

Colin Thubron

#8. A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.

Colin Thubron

#9. Siberia: it fills one twelfth of the land-mass of the whole Earth, yet this is all it leaves for certain in the mind. A bleak beauty, and an indelible fear.

Colin Thubron