Travel Writers

"Three things alone are certain when you venture into a loft: that you will crack your head on a beam at least twice, that you will get cobwebs draped over your face, and that you will not find what you went looking for."

"America is an outstandingly dangerous place. Consider this: every year in New Hampshire a dozen or more people are killed crashing their cars into moose. Now correct me if I am wrong, but this is not something that is likely to happen to you on the way home from Sainsbury's."

"By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all [Presidents] was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor, and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions."

"For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match."

"America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span."

"The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well."

"“Tell me, did they specify ’asshole’ on the job description, or did you take a course?“"

"Now Stonewall Jackson is a man worth taking an interest in. Few people in history have achieved greater fame in a shorter period with less useful activity in the brainbox than Gen. Thomas J. Jackson. (long list of character deficiencies elided)... His ineradicable fame rests almost entirely on the fact that he had a couple of small but inspiring victories when elsewhere Southern troops were being slaughtered and routed and by dint of having the best nickname any soldier has ever enjoyed."

"Now here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American does in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days—that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That’s ridiculous."

"“Virginia?” he said, as if I had asked him if there was anywhere local we could get a dose of syphilis."

"I bought a copy of the Nashville Tennessean out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton—not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened—was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them."

"Excuse me, but I just have to say this. You are more stupid than a paramecium."

"Let’s not lose our perspective here. The Smokies achieved their natural splendor without the guidance of a national park service and don’t actually need it now."

"In the Smokies, over 90 percent of Fraser firs—a noble tree, unique to the southern Appalachian highlands—are sick or dying, from a combination of acid rain and the depredations of a moth called the balsam woolly adelgid. Ask a park official what they are doing about it and he will say, “We are monitoring the situation closely.” For this, read: “We are watching them die.”"

"The Smokies seem to be in the process of losing most of their mussels. The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting—certainly the most striking—example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service’s stewardship lost seven species of mammal—the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America’s national parks this century."

"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations."

"I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident from the first moment that she was a rarity."

"I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, "Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!" Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that."

"Blackpool's illuminations are nothing if not splendid, and they are not splendid."

"Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful."

"We couldn't place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under."

"I don't care how paranoid and irrational this makes me sound, but I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead."

"Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head. - Katz"

"The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience."

"We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls."

"Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain."

"For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption."

"I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise."

"A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)"

"Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats."

"I watched a rerun on television of a 1960s comedy programme called "Mr Ed", which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material."

"I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope."

"I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car."

"My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines."

"When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a girl called Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever."

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to."

"[A]lways keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse"

"Had he chosen to devote himself wholly to letters during that decade, his reputation would, perhaps, be more solid today. For there can be no question at all that Belloc was one of the finest prose-writers of the century; one of the most distinctive minor poets and the most accomplished practitioner of ‘light’ or ‘comic’ verse. He is out of fashion, out of print, in most cases out of mind, not because of the quality of his literary output, but, very largely, because of the nature of his political and religious beliefs. He regarded politics as far too important a matter to be taken wholly seriously. He was rewarded by not being taken seriously himself. Although we can now see that many of his political judgements were right, that was not to prevent him being a complete political failure. Being in the right is not infrequently the unforgivable sin in politics. He began as a republican. He ended as an authoritarian monarchist. At no stage did he have any noticeable sympathy with parliamentary institutions. This angered people. He regarded ‘the party system’ as humbug, and said so."

"Between Lord Lundy and the Dodo, Belloc's genius as a light versifier stands unchallenged after half a century. The English find it hard to believe that a master of light verse can also be a serious poet. Nevertheless, a serious poet he was, and the master of a warmth and range which at their best even excel most of his work in prose. In fine, if he left no single masterpiece except, perhaps, the Cautionary Tales and their parallel volumes, if even The Path to Rome and the collected essays are too discursive to rank with the unimpeachable books of their period, it is impossible to withhold a pre-eminent place among the masters of the twentieth century to a writer who resumed in his single person the high spirits of Mr. Evelyn Waugh at his best, the political vigour of a Mallock, the satire of Mr. Maugham, a forthright, fresh and lively style in all his many-sided prose, and a lyrical note rarely heard since the close of the century before."

"I suppose that if you asked a hundred people who knew him, what struck them most about him they would answer: "His physical and intellectual vitality.""

"His wit was French, but his humour English. He was profoundly moved by the beauty of English landscape, but preferred the French way of living. His military temper, his love of justice rather than order, the logical processes of his thought were French. At sea he was English, but Irish in that recurring dream of a landfall which is not of this world. Some have called him, for his hearty pugnacity, a figure as English as Cobbett. Others have emphasized his many un-English qualities. In appearance he seemed to be an Englishman dressed as a Frenchman."

"Beyond those deservedly famous, witty cautionary verses, Belloc's reputation has not survived. His views were unpopular: he was Roman Catholic of the continental tradition, anti-Jew, and a trenchant critic of Parliament despite sitting as a MP for South Salford. And in his craft, although a prolific writer, he was careless. Many books were dictated, and though full of inspired passages, were patchy and repetitive; perhaps they should be declaimed. His book on Milton...was dictated over the space of ten days in his study at Kingsland, his Sussex home... It is precisely the unevenness of Belloc's work which confines him to the lower Parnassian slopes."

"Finally, and indeed from beginning to end, there is his Catholicism: the heart of his preposterousness. Obviously, one might say, Englishmen cannot ultimately be anything but foggy Anglicans—anything else will not really do. One might recall how Belloc wound himself in indignant knots summoning up ideas of Catholic Christendom which were already centuries out of date when Voltaire attacked them (Europe and The Faith). Or how he convinced himself that English roofs nestling together meant barbarity, while a long straight row of French houses along a paved round meant civilization (The Path to Rome)."

"In his history, theoretically the most objective genre, he is like a wonderful quick-change artist, for beneath the period paint of each protagonist we see the familiar square features: the hidden reliance of Cromwell the campaigner on his family life; the uplifting physical presence of Danton in the tumbril on the way to the guillotine."

"I don't know if I told you, that in Rome Hilaire Belloc turned up (a wonderful old man!) ... He is a very great writer and with Maurras and Daudet in France, and his friend Chesterton, they have all been forerunners of the Right movement. He thinks I have done a really good thing with Flowering Rifle, and that my other work will not even count beside it in the long run. His word is worth more than the whole of Fleet Street."

"The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie."

"All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men."

"Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death."

"Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing."

"The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam."