Bruce Chatwin Quotations

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.

As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.

I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.

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?

A journey is a fragment of Hell.

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.

And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.

Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security.

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.

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.

Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber.

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.

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.

I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

Anything was better than to be loved for one's things.

For life is a journey through a wilderness

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.'

When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

Music… is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.

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.

The song and the land are one.

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.

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.

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

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.

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.

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.

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.

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

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

Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.

To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe