The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.

Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.

Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.