If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

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

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel