Local radio stations dissolve into static every five miles; insects detonate against the windshield. He stops and has the oil checked. The American is in his seasonal migration.

— James Thurber

I’ve never made the trip to or from Connecticut without its resembling the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

— Pat Buckley

 

Someday the sun is going to shine down on me in some faraway place.

— Mahalia Jackson

I was going to stay on the three million miles of bent and narrow rural American two-lane, the roads to Podunk and Toonerville. Into the sticks, the boondocks, the burgs, backwaters, jerkwaters, the wide-spots-in-the-road, the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it towns. Into those places where you say, “My god! What if you lived here!” The Middle of Nowhere.

— William Least Heat Moon

Whenever you get there, there’s no there there.

— Gertrude Stein

One did not “hop” a plane. One took a long slow ride to an airport, and argued for hours with ticket agents who seemed to have been hired five minutes ago for what they supposed to be another job; and if one survived that, one got to Chicago only to join a “stack” over the airfield there, and then either died of boredom or crashed into a plane that thought it was in the stack over Newark.

— Amanda Cross

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

— John Steinbeck

The train, panting up past lonely farms, / Fed by the fireman’s restless arms… / Past cotton grass and moorland boulder / Shoveling white steam over her shoulder.

— W.H. Auden

Caboose, cabin car, crummy, way car, van, ape cage, throne room, hack, buggy, the office, shanty, monkey house, bedbug haven — American railroaders have known the last car on a freight train by all these names and more, often as an ever-so-humble home.

— Donald Dale Jackson

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

— Mark Twain

Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.

— Muhammad

Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.

— Hannah Arendt

The use of traveling is to regulate the imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

— Samuel Johnson

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

— Aldous Huxley

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

— Sinclair Lewis

...He won’t fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won’t fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation.

— Spalding Gray

It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.

 — Soren Kierkegaard