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 ChatwinI slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed's dictum, 'A journey is a fragment of Hell.'
Bruce ChatwinI 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 ChatwinEven today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land."
Bruce ChatwinA Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will.
Bruce ChatwinI never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.
Bruce ChatwinMan's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.
Bruce ChatwinWhen people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.
Bruce ChatwinTo lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.
Bruce ChatwinProust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.
Bruce ChatwinIt's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home.
Bruce ChatwinThe 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 ChatwinIf 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 ChatwinI learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.
Bruce ChatwinRichard 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 ChatwinI 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 ChatwinSluggish 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 ChatwinAs you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.
Bruce Chatwin