“I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.”

“If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT.Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.”

“It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.”

“The romantic view would be that nomads are wonderful people, better than us; they care about the environment.”

“The genre has moved into this commercial aspect of itself, and ignored this extraordinarily rich literature that's filed everywhere else except under travel.”

“The truth is I'm not really interested in travel writing as it's generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing.”

“I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.”

“I do not mean to say that we should, or could, return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge and grand poetical schemata derived from the mobile life that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy.”

“By taking to the road, we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.”

“In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu sadhu, the pilgrims of Compostela walking past their sins, the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora, the haj.”

“The French word for wanderlust or wandering is 'errance.' The etymology is the same as 'error.' So to wander is to make mistakes. In other words, to make mistakes, to make errors is sort of the idea of learning through trial and error, allowing the mistakes to be part of the process.”