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Top Bruce Chatwin Quotes

Browse top 25 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Bruce Chatwin.

Favorite Bruce Chatwin Quotes

1. "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." ~ Bruce Chatwin
2. "Anything was better than to be loved for one's things." ~ Bruce Chatwin
3. "Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin." ~ Bruce Chatwin
4. "To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe" ~ Bruce Chatwin
5. "As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'." ~ Bruce Chatwin
6. "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
7. "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
8. "A journey is a fragment of Hell." ~ Bruce Chatwin
9. "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
10. "Sometimes, I overheard my aunts discussing these blighted destinies; and Aunt Ruth would hug me, as if to forestall my following in their footsteps. Yet, from the way she lingered over such words as 'Xanadu' or 'Samarkand' or the 'wine-dark sea,' I think she also felt the trouble of the 'wanderer in her soul." ~ Bruce Chatwin
11. "We shall not lie on our backs at the Red Castle and watch the vultures wheeling over the valley where they killed the grandson of Genghiz. We will not read Babur's memoirs in his garden at Istalif and see the blind man smelling his way around the rose bushes. Or sit in the Peace of Islam with the beggars of Gazar Gagh. We will not stand on the Buddha's head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry-dock. We will not sleep in the nomad tent, or scale the Minaret of Jam. And we shall lose the tastes - the hot, coarse, bitter bread; the green tea flavoured with cardamoms; the grapes we cooled in the snow-melt; and the nuts and dried mulberries we munched for altitude sickness. Nor shall we get back the smell of the beanfields, the sweet, resinous smell of deodar wood burning, or the whiff of a snow leopard at 14,000 feet." ~ Bruce Chatwin
12. "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
13. "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
14. "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
15. "Gradually the idea for a book began to take shape. It was to be a wildly ambitious and intolerant work, a kind of 'Anatomy of Restlessness' that would enlarge on Pascal's dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room. The argument, roughly, was as follows: that in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory 'drive' or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this 'drive' was inseparable from his central nervous system; and, that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile societies such as the gypsies were egalitarian, thing-free and resistant to change; also why, to re-establish the harmony of the First State, all the great teachers - Buddha, Lao-tse, St Francis - had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way." ~ Bruce Chatwin
16. "[...] la selezione naturale ci ha foggiati - dalla struttura delle cellule cerebrali alla struttura dell'alluce - per una vita di viaggi stagionali a piedi in una torrida distesa di rovi o di deserto.Se era così, se la "patria" era il deserto, se i nostri istinti si erano forgiati nel deserto, per sopravvivere ai suoi rigori - allora era facile capire perché i pascoli più verdi ci vengono a noia, perché le ricchezze ci logorano e perchè l'immaginario uomo di Pascal considerava i suoi confortevoli alloggi una prigione." ~ Bruce Chatwin
17. "Quali sono, quindi le prime impressioni che un bimbo nomade ha del mondo? Un capezzolo dondolante e una cascata d'oro." ~ Bruce Chatwin
18. "Al termine di una notte di luna un cane ulula e poi ammutolisce. La luce del fuoco tremola e la sentinella sbadiglia. Un uomo vecchissimo passa silenzioso davanti alle tende, e saggia il terreno con un bastone per accertarsi di non inciampare nelle corde tese. Poi prosegue. La sua gente si trasferisce in una regione più verde. Mosè si reca all'appuntamento con gli sciacalli e gli avvoltoi." ~ Bruce Chatwin
19. "Un marabutto smise di pregare per interrogarmi."Esiste un popolo chiamato mericani?" chiese."Sì"."Dicono che hanno visitato la luna"."E' vero"."Sono blasfemi"." ~ Bruce Chatwin
20. "Senza costrizione non si potrebbe fondare nessun insediamento. [...]" ~ Bruce Chatwin
21. "Fino a quando, Signore, fino a quando?... "Finché non siano devastate le città...". I Profeti confidavano in un Giorno della Restaurazione, in cui gli Ebrei sarebbero ritornati al frugale ascetismo della vita nomade." ~ Bruce Chatwin
22. "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
23. "For life is a journey through a wilderness" ~ Bruce Chatwin
24. "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
25. "I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical." ~ Bruce Chatwin

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Today's Quote

And for the love of God, bitch, don't get stabbed this time!"
Author: Alexandra Bracken

What Did Bruce Chatwin Talk About?

Con
Son
Journey
Wit
Sin
Walk
Per
Boo
Here
Rest
Tan
Era
Side
Low
Book
Hen
Thin
Use
Foot
Ape
King
Mad
Itself
Sit
Self
Road
Ten
House

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