The Best American Travel Writing 2016 Quotes

“explanations, like dreams, only make sense while they’re happening.”
― Bill Bryson, The Best American Travel Writing 2016

“Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” All love affairs, all long-term relationships—travel included—demand that we keep an element of mystery alive and kicking.”
― Bill Bryson, The Best American Travel Writing 2016

“I have eaten good food in unprepossessing locales, but I doubt the disparity between the crude, shabby atmosphere of that nameless cement-block dispensary of protein and redemption and the quality of the lunch laid on by the butcher of Zegota will ever be matched.”
― Bill Bryson, The Best American Travel Writing 2016

“On my next-to-last day in the country, I flew into Tokyo from Sapporo and needed to get to Tokyo’s main railroad station, called Shinjuku. I climbed into a taxi at the airport and said to the driver, “Shinjuku station, please.” He didn’t seem to have any idea what I meant. I repeated my request, as articulately as I could, and he looked at me as if I had asked him to take me to Boise. I pulled a map of Tokyo out and showed him Shinjuku station. He studied this with a look of great dissatisfaction, but at length put the car in gear and we set off. We drove for what seemed hours through the endless, numbing sprawl of Tokyo. Eventually we entered a long, deep tunnel—a kind of underground freeway, it seemed. About a mile along, the driver pulled into an emergency parking bay and stopped. He pointed to a metal door cut into the tunnel wall and indicated that I should get out and go through that door. “You want me to go through that door?” I said in disbelief. He nodded robustly and presented me with a bill for about a zillion yen. Everything was beginning to seem more than a touch surreal. He took my money, gave me several small bills in change, and encouraged me to depart, with a little shooing gesture. This was crazy. We were in a tunnel, for crying out loud. If I got out and he drove off, I would be hundreds of feet under Tokyo in a busy traffic tunnel with no sidewalk or other escape. You’ll understand when I say this didn’t feel entirely right. “Through that door there?” I said again, dubiously. He nodded and made another shooing gesture. I got out with my suitcase and went up three metal steps to the door and turned the handle. The door opened. I looked back at the driver. He nodded in encouragement. Ahead of me, lit with what seemed emergency lighting, was the longest flight of stairs I had ever seen. It took a very long while to climb them all. At the top I came to another door, exactly like the one at the bottom. I turned the handle and cautiously opened it, then stepped out onto the concourse of the world’s busiest railway station. I don’t know whether this is the way lots of people get to Shinjuku or whether I am the only person in history ever to have done so. But what I do know is this: it’s why I like to travel.”
― Bill Bryson, The Best American Travel Writing 2016

“Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it.”
― Bill Bryson, The Best American Travel Writing 2016

“Can we “belong anywhere?” Should we try?”
― Bill Bryson, The Best American Travel Writing 2016

“hostile”
― Bill Bryson, The Best American Travel Writing 2016

“The central feature of modern travel, it seems to me, isn’t that there are too many tourists in too many places, but rather that there are too many tourists in just a few places—quite a different matter. The world is a long way away from being ruined for travel.”
― Bill Bryson, The Best American Travel Writing 2016