Don’t Go There! Quotes

“Boredom is a luxury good,”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“Technically, I could have said “journalist” or “writer.” However, admitting to these professions is like uttering a special secret password to Travel Hell. No one wants journalists or writers in their country because they have a habit of writing things, and sometimes these things are even true.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“If people can be bothered to organise a demo, write songs, paint signs, and march through the streets holding those signs and singing those songs, outraged, you can be pretty sure they’ll have a valid point.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“The sort of moment, I imagine, that people go travelling for. One of complete presence. A moment that will play longer in the theatre of the mind than a hundred nights of Netflix on the couch, a thousand boring business meetings, ten thousand uneventful commutes. A moment that you sense, while in it, will become one of your stories. A track on your anecdote Greatest Hits playlist. Part of your identity.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“Those of us born as majority people will never know how much of a fight it is to live as a minority, not protected by the cushioning of statistics.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“The mind is a fragile thing; life is its blunt-force trauma.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“The truth is that war is useful to governments. In wartime, all the attention is on that and not on the government. Corruption is easiest during wartime. In reality, the people in power don’t want a solution, because they are the ones benefiting from war. We Palestinians need peace, the Israelis merely ask for it. That’s a big difference. That’s why it never happens”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“Boredom is a luxury good. This simple statement dug its claws into me and didn’t let go. Of course. I’d lost sight of the extraordinary privilege inherent within boredom.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“If you move the needle of history back far enough, aren’t we all invaders, all foreigners, all squatting on what was once someone else’s land? The first ape’s climbing down from the trees was a dick move that condemned hundreds of thousands of other animals to extinction at our hands.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“A short (thousand-kilometre) train ride later we reached Beijing, where we climbed a certain famous wall while learning about Mongolian hordes. A wall that robs you of your breath, replacing it with awe and disbelief that mere humans could build something this expansive just to stop other humans from killing and enslaving them.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“I hadn’t realised then that the only way you know that something has value is if you find yourself willing to make sacrifices for it.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“Perhaps uncertainty is a good trait, in line with the complexity of the world in which we live.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“I looked up at the monolith before us. All of its lights were off. It didn’t look like a hotel. It looked like the sort of place hope went to die, had its corpse been dragged out the back and buried, before being dug back up and shot again, just to be sure. What had its architect been thinking? And, perhaps more importantly, had he or she been adequately punished for those thoughts?”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“You confuse freedom with having no responsibilities. But that’s not freedom. That’s just selfishness.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“It’s nice that human society has reached a level of sophistication and development that we don’t have to spend our time bent over in fields encouraging food to appear from the ground. However, now that we’ve all become yoga teachers, graphic designers, and writers, it’s easy to forget how spectacularly bereft we are of actual life skills, how flimsy our qualifications are in the things that really count: life and death things.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“Annett, you’re in charge,” he yelled over his shoulder. “Look after the kids.” “What?” she shrieked. “How do I do that?” Annett is not into children in the same way people are not into being hit with rocks. She’s aware that they exist and that there’s nothing she can do to prevent this, but feels no desire to enjoy their existence any more than that. Perhaps because they’re so uninterested in being efficient. Fortunately, Djarbah’s children were well behaved to the point of being faulty.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“His words stroll out like well-dressed senior citizens on an afternoon walk.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“I wanted to debate this further but I held back—mostly because he was driving as if we were in a go-kart and he’d eaten a special mushroom giving him infinite lives.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“It was, in many ways, a beautiful moment. The sort of moment, I imagine, that people go travelling for. One of complete presence. A moment that will play longer in the theatre of the mind than a hundred nights of Netflix on the couch, a thousand boring business meetings, ten thousand uneventful commutes. A moment that you sense, while in it, will become one of your stories. A track on your anecdote Greatest Hits playlist. Part of your identity. Did I tell you the one about the blizzard? No, well, sit down…”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places