Such people, while useful, even agreeable, to others, are, if truth be told, frequently unhappy–lonely in fact. Yes, they seek out others, and it may even seem to them that in a certain country or city they have managed to find true kinship and fellowship, having come to know and learn about a people; but they wake up one day and suddenly feel that nothing actually binds them to these people, that they can leave here at once. They realize that another country, some other people, have now beguiled them, and that yesterday’s most riveting event now pales and loses all meaning and significance. For all intents and purposes, they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots. Their empathy is sincere, but superficial. If asked which of the countries they have visited they like best, they are embarrassed–they do not know how to answer. Which one? In a certain sense–all of them. There is something compelling about each. To which country would they like to return once more? Again, embarrassment–they had never asked themselves such a question. The one certainty is that they would like to be back on the road, going somewhere. To be on their way again–that is the dream.

Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus

I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, Oh, really? and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, Well, I teach high school. He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, I went to high school, and walked away.

Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a storyteller. I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than just a teacher, and storyteller felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.

Peter Ferry, Travel Writing

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes sightseeing.

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

I had observed that most people who wrote stories of travel journeyed over the country in firstclass coaches. They visited only the great cities and points of known interest. . . . Their stories are of beaten paths and, dress them as artistically and originally as they may, they are only telling a tale that has been told. While making no particular claim to superiority in writing, I thought by assuming the garb of a sailor and traveling as one of the plain, everyday toilers I could get closer to nature and her children and tell a story of our country such as had never been told.

John Albert Krohn, The Walk of Colonial Jack

Go far—too far you cannot, still the farther

The more experience finds you: And go sparing;—

One meal a week will serve you, and one suit,

Through all your travels; for you'll find it certain,

The poorer and the baser you appear,

The more you look through still.

John Fletcher, The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed