Jupiter's Travels Quotes

“In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the same size it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see. It is not a trick to go round these days, you can pay a lot of money and fly round it nonstop in less than forty-eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way. Not flying, not floating. You have to stay on the ground and swallow the bugs as you go. Then the world is immense. The best you can do is to trace your long, infinitesimally thin line through the dust and extrapolate.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“Maybe you know how it is when you have decided to do something really enormous with your life, something that stretches your resources to the limit. You can get the feeling that you are engaged in a trial of strength with the universe.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“For three days and two nights I drift up the Nile along Lake Nasser. The sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside out and empties my heart into the sky. The stars are close enough to grasp. Lying on the roof of the ferry at night, I begin at last to know the constellations, and start a personal relationship with that particular little cluster of jewels called the Pleiades, which nestles in the sky not far from Orion's belt and sword. Really, those stars, when they come that close, you have to take them seriously.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“Thank you, Mr. Simon, but what about God? It is reported that at one time you considered yourself to be God. Do you not think that to be rather blasphemous?"
No. I do think it is possible to be God for brief moments. I am certainly not God now.
"But surely, in your country, most people believe there is only one God?"
I think God is the composite creation of large numbers of people being good for a moment - the way football fans keep a steady glow going in a stadium because there is always someone lighting a match. If people stopped being good altogether God would vanish.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The
challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world. The real danger was death by exposure.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“Generally when a man in uniform has something unusual brought to his attention, his instinct is to stop it.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels

“If Thoreau were alive today he would have full confirmation of his fears. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“There's a lot of water everywhere. The roads near the sea front are under two feet of it. Do they mention this in the brochures? I see a package of Nordic tourists washed up in a hotel lobby. The hotel looks as though it has absorbed its own weight of water.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“Oh tell me please, how does it go, the triple jump?" She pro nounced it tripee-el She had a way of pleading for things in her Brazilian English to make you understand that they were matters simultaneously of no consequence and of life and death. You could refuse, and nothing would be changed; or you could give, and earn undying gratitude. It was a great gift, which she had won by long effort and sorrow and laughter. It was the humorous residue of cravings which had once been corrosive enough to etch her face.
"Is that the hop, skip and jump?" I asked lazily from the rock where I was sitting and reading. I did not want to leave my rock. I had my left leg over the side with the foot in the sand. Every thirty seconds or so the movements of the water combined to send a wave swishing along the side of the rock, covering my leg up to the knee and cooling it. I felt the sun's heat flowing through me into the sea.
"I really don't know," I said. `Why? What's fascinating you?" She had asked about the triple jump once before, I remembered, in Rio.
"I don't know," she said, each word long-drawn-out and husky. "I am going to try it anyway."
She pursed her mouth and did a coltish sprint along the sand finishing with both feet together. She stood for a while with the sun on her back, her face in shadow, looking again at the prints she had left.
I watched her still, exploring the shape of her body. I would have expected a dancer's body to be harder, to show more muscle.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“The enigma that had bothered me in Sydney was beginning to resolve itself. If Australians allowed themselves to be represented worldwide as a nation of beer-sodden boors and hysterical Amazons, it must be through sheer lack of imagination. Like most people everywhere they spent most of their time just getting by, but there was no collective dream or mythology that told them what it was they were supposed to be doing. In that respect they were far behind the Aborigines they had decimated and despised.

Yet many signs indicated that the time might not be too far away, when Australians would agree on a better reason for living than to eat a pound of beef a day. When that day came, I thought this would become one of the world’s best places to be.

The faces of the old men told me there had been something once that was lost and could be found again.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“Everything in this picture I took with me, except the tires. They were sent on. And the umbrella? That was the photographer's, but eventually I did get one of my own, and it was remarkably useful. I strapped it alongside, under the saddle and over a box on my right. On the left side I carried a sword, but that's another story...”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“My appointment with destiny was approaching. Raj's father was getting ready to leave for his office in Patna.
"Come," he said. "We'll sit in the car."
We sat turned towards each other, and he said:
"Give me your hand."
I held it out, and he grasped it as in a handshake, but held it in his grip for several moments. Then, releasing it, he gave my thumb a quick backward flip, and murmured:
"Achcha!
"You have a very determined soul. This also is reflected in your mind.
"You are Jupiter...."
Why not? I thought. I like the sound of that.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“is”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“What happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the journey.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“If the Japanese ever got a foothold, British bikes would quickly become only a nostalgic memory.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

“But it was nothing, a paper seal slipped in assembly, easily put right. You could stop the oil if you took the trouble. That was what British bikes liked, a bit of trouble. They thrived on attention, like certain people, and repaid you for it. Not a bad relationship to have.”
― Ted Simon, Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph