Wheels Within Wheels Quotes

“To me, city-dwellers are The Dispossessed, unfortunates who have been deprived of every creature’s right to territory. There is a sense in which country folk, however impoverished, own their birthplace and all the land around it that can be covered in a long day’s tramp – the natural, immemorial limit to the territory of a human being.”
― Dervla Murphy, Wheels Within Wheels: The Making of a Traveller

“[On George Eliot's Middlemarch]:

Reading it seemed like watching God creating the world in miniature.”
― Dervla Murphy, Wheels Within Wheels

“Men and women who live all their lives in centrally heated homes and offices, and go in the car to post a letter and collect the children from school, and have labour-saving devices for every conceivable purpose (including electric tooth-brushes and carving-knives)—such people have become so sensually unaware and so unresponsive to physical challenges that they are only half-alive.”
― Dervla Murphy, Wheels Within Wheels

“The hardships and poverty of my youth had been a good apprenticeship for this form of travel. I had been brought up to understand that material possessions and physical comfort should never be confused with success, achievement and security. And soon I was discovering for myself that our real material needs are very few and that the extras now presented as 'needs' not only endanger true contentment but diminish our human dignity.”
― Dervla Murphy, Wheels Within Wheels