Travels with Charley: In Search of America Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of h...

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash -- all of them -- surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so ...

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

But it isn't hunger that drives millions of armed American Males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don't quite know ho...

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanch...

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed,...

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

But from the start I had withheld from him any information about the giant redwoods. It seemed to me that a Long Island poodle who had made his devoirs to or might be set apart from other dogs--might even be like that Galahad who saw the Grail. The c...

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

I don't ever drink alone. It's not much fun. And I don't think I will until I am an alcoholic.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

She wasn't happy, but then she wasn't unhappy. She wasn't anything. But I don't believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing. This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a d...

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Curious how a place unvisited can take such hold on the mind so that the very name sets up a ringing.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

...many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chai...

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

...people don’t take trips—trips take people.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America