The Best American Travel Writing 2015 Quotes

“Most Berlin nightclubs aren’t like the American kind. Security is light, rules are lax. Generally there is no bottle service, no VIP section, and, Berghain aside, no velvet rope. In this respect, they bear little resemblance to, say, Studio 54, which, glorious as it may have been, begat a stratified style that metastasized into the models-and-bankers Maybach-and-Cristal rat race that deflected a generation away from the clubbing life in the U.S.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Techno emerged in the early to mideighties in and around Detroit, at the hands of black middle-class DJs who for some reason idealized the glamour and suavity of European electronic pop and Italo disco, as it reached them via GQ and the radio DJ who called himself the Electrifying Mojo. They brought some rigor and a hint of Motown to it and created an industrial-sounding music that was funky, futuristic, and kind of arch—evoking the auto plants that were putting these kids’ parents out of work.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Berlin is to electronic music what Florence was to Renaissance art: crucible, arbiter, patron. Credit for this could go as far back as Bismarck; the city owes its peculiar fertility as much to the follies of statesmen and generals as to any generation of ardent youth. Citizens have spoken and sung for many years of the “Berliner Luft”—“the nervous, endlessly quivering Berlin air,” as Conrad Alberti wrote in 1889, “which works upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Solitude in the outdoors was surely all the more healing for those of us who had not only the physical and moral pollution of industrialized society to escape, but also the incessant chatter of everyone we have ever known running constantly across our screens and phones.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“the importance of setting out, a call to the open road and its possibilities, lessons, heartbreaks, and occasional joys—a reaffirmation of the value of the investment required to leave the safety of shore. As yet unknown riches await the bold.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“It ought never to be forgotten that travel can be a revelation, offering the very real possibility of recaptured innocence to our jaded eyes. The paradox of travel’s effort is the renewal it affords.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Travel, I was convinced, was not something frivolous, to be indulged in merely by the idle or the wealthy or the unshowered backpacker. It was something worth fighting for. Travel changed my life; it could change yours. Travel mattered: that was my message.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Travel is often a petri dish for both our character defects and our finer qualities, and in this moment my baser attributes had me in their clutches.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“set in motion a decade of wandering that rewrote how I experienced the world. Travel became not so much about the destination as an end but a means of understanding myself in that place. The world became my university campus.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Kapuściński’s masterpiece, The Soccer War, when he writes: “There is so much crap in this world and then, suddenly, there is honesty and humanity.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“I’m a refugee who can vote.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“William Blake wrote, “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars,”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Smaller than Delaware, packed with 2.7 million people, the core of a proposed future Palestinian state, the occupied West Bank is partitioned by the Oslo Accords into zones of Palestinian and Israeli control: Areas A, B, and C. Each of the zones has its own restrictions, guidelines, regulations. A political map of the territory looks like an X-ray: a diseased heart, mottled, speckled, clotted, hollowed out.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“The bus was supposed to cross 3,500 miles of pavement (roughly the same distance as a flight from New York to Paris) in about 96 hours.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“The guidebooks and placards inside don’t tell you that these sites were created more to influence international opinion than to memorialize the dead.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“the S-21 prison, the infamous detention and torture center where he’d aided in documenting the 14,000 people who came through the facility, only 7 of whom survived.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Chinese clients used to talk only about prices and vintages, not what was in the bottle. Now the important thing is not how much money you have but how you express it in wine knowledge.” Tim Weiland, former general manager of the exclusive Aman at Summer Palace in the emperor’s onetime retreat in Beijing, suggests that the image of China’s wealthy class as crass nouveau riche—mixing expensive Bordeaux with Coca-Cola, for example—is entirely out of date. “The nouveaux riches of ten years ago are now the old rich,” he says. “They have homes in Switzerland and Aspen, they’re incredibly sophisticated and well traveled—much more well traveled than I am—and they know their wines.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Except for Lisbon, Berlin is the cheapest capital in Western Europe. This despite being the capital of the Continent’s richest country. Its population is still lower than it was at the outset of the Second World War. It’s a little like a mountain town with ski bums and trustafarians cycling through. The kids come to play, not to stay.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“If North Korea were The Hunger Games, Pyongyang would be the Capitol: a place reserved for the elite to enjoy good food, nice clothes, and electricity. Out in the districts, the people have nothing.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“This is Florida. People here gleefully cake their lawns and golf courses in nitrogen, then wax nostalgic for a time when the springs weren’t clouded over.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015