Travels With Charley: In Search Of America Quotes
"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch."
"Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping."
"Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over."
"We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."
"The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
"But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England."
"My memories were distorted by twenty-five intervening years."
"I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light."
"Otherwise, in writing, I could not tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the larger truth."
"From the first muttered "Santé" and the first clicking sip you could feel the Brotherhood of Man growing until it filled Rocinante full—and the sisterhood also."
"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states."
"The division of thirds was put on the basis that there wasn’t enough to save."
"There are times that one treasures for all one’s life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall."
"I remember when a coin in a slot would get you a stick of gum or a candy bar, but in these dining palaces were vending machines where various coins could deliver handkerchiefs, comb-and-nail-file sets, hair conditioners and cosmetics, first-aid kits, minor drugs such as aspirin, mild physics, pills to keep you awake."
"The way was longer than I had thought and I was very tired. My years spoke for my attention with aching shoulders but I was aimed at the Connecticut River and I ignored the weariness, and this was utter nonsense."
"I find this interesting, but it does make for suspicion of history as a record of reality."
"If manners maketh man, then manner and grooming maketh poodle."
"If there had been room in Rocinante I would have packed the W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them."
"The first impression forced on me was that permanence is neither achieved nor desired by mobile people."
"Curious how a place unvisited can take such hold on the mind so that the very name sets up a ringing."
"As a sop to hurt feelings, I must admit that when I passed through Moorhead, Minnesota, and rattled across the Red River into Fargo on the other side, it was a golden autumn day."
"Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of alone-ness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together."
"Only through imitation do we develop toward originality."
"A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present."
"Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling."
"I came with the wish to learn what America is like."
"My mother believed that cold water on the feet forced the blood to your head so that you thought better."
"I discovered something about Charley I might never have known."
"The sequoias, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always."
"To me there’s a remote and cloistered feeling here."
"The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect."
"Respect—that’s the word. One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns."
"It is not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time."
"The people partake of all the local facilities, the hospitals, the schools, police protection, welfare programs, and so far they do not pay taxes."
"I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction."
"The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast."
"The old port with narrow streets and cobbled surfaces, smoke-grimed, goes into a period of desolation inhabited at night by the vague ruins of men."
"The whole of eastern Montana and the western Dakotas is memory-marked as Injun country, and the memories are not very old either."
"What we knew is dead, and maybe the greatest part of what we were is dead."
"In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me."
"You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory."
"External reality has a way of being not so external after all."
"Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners."
"There’s going to be trouble, I said to myself."
"Life, no matter on what level, must be moist or it will disappear."
"No living thing is without the factor of survival."