The Best American Travel Writing 2021 Quotes

“If you came to this article looking for an answer, change what you're looking for. Don't look for answers, look for the questions. The more you ask yourself, the more you'll learn about yourself. Keep traveling. Go far, explore often, meet new people and make new friends. Just do so not to escape life, but to enrich it. Catch flights, and feelings. You can't avoid pain and suffering. But you can upgrade and embrace it.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“Just like anything in life, there are positive and negative reasons to do something. Luckily with travel, whether you do it for a positive or negative reason, there is always much to be gained. So maybe we don't use the word "addiction" when thinking of travel. Perhaps the better way to look at it is to check in with the intent behind your travel. If you find yourself traveling often with no apparent reason, not even an interest in the destination, maybe ask yourself: Is there a form of suffering you're trying to avoid?”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“Restoring what has broken is a reminder to be careful with that is here now.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“Because here's a thing I've come to understand of late: context really does affect flavor. A place, its atmosphere, the people within it, their mood (and ours) genuinely change the way things taste. A restaurant lasagna has to be twice as good as your mother's or that one you had on that trip to Italy -- for it to be remind you of it even a little. A rack fo smoked pork ribs will never taste as good on a ceramic plate atop a tablecloth as it does from within a Styrofoam box on the hood of your car, downwind a roadside smoker, I hope that I never find out what Waffle House tastes like while sober, eaten in broad daylight.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“Pleasure demands presence. It invites you to inhabit your body more fully; no part of you is held at remote.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“The pause we're experiencing can highlight a basic truth: we may or may not walk this way again, and even if we do, we will never be precisely the same people who experienced that journey in the first place. Travel is only ever about a moment in time and space, but it's also about how we choose to hold that moment in our memories. It is always both present and past.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“But part of education of travel lies in seeing things with fresh and ignorant eyes -- and in being wrong. Which is why it's important to check in with that younger traveler from time to time, to retrace the journeys that remain vivid in my mind, to ask new questions of where I've gone before.”
― jason wilson , The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“The beauty of good writing is that it transports the reader inside another person’s experience in some other physical place and culture and, at its best, evokes a palpable feeling of being in a specific moment in time and space.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021

“I don’t think I verbalized it to anyone, including myself, but I knew then that I wanted to be a perpetual traveler. I was happiest receiving and experiencing new information about the world, in situ.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021

“I appreciated all the anonymous strangers I passed for the ways they suggested, even if I didn't know their stories, how many different ways it was possible to craft a life. The man buying mangoes at the bodega just before midnight? Maybe he was a father of five. Maybe he was a single father of five.Maybe he and his husband were trying to adopt. Maybe he and his wife had been trying to have a child for years. Maybe he and his wife knew they didn't want a child; maybe they were saving up to travel the world instead. Maybe he lived alone with his aging mother. Who could know his story? I never would. But I didn't need to. I only needed to know, through his presence on that sidewalk, that so many plotlines for a life were possible.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“There can be a radical honesty to pleasure, a profound nakedness in surrendering fully to the unguarded, unselfconscious states of enjoyment. It's harder to hide or dissimulate when you're enjoying yourself.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“My body wasn't something to be starved or cut or filled with booze until I blacked out; it was something to be taken care of.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“If there are certain moments when I question the value of travel writing, I also know that it's important for the traveler to eventually return to where he or she came from, to write and try to capture the experience of being an outsider in an unfamiliar place. Yes, much of travel writing is soulless and transactional, listicles and charticles and "if you go" tips. Yet as its most ideal, the worth of the genre lies in exploring the tensions of our interior journey vs. our exterior itinerary, in examining our expectations (and hopes and biases) of a destination vs. the reality of of what we found, and in measuring the person we are at home vs. the person we become abroad.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021: Essays on Diverse Cultures and the Joy of Feeling Elsewhere

“Together, all four now subscribed to a set of teachings that boiled down to “the law of nonresistance,” as they described it—fundamentally, making the best of the current moment.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021

“tips. Yet at its most ideal, the worth of the genre lies in exploring the tensions of our interior journey vs. our exterior itinerary, in examining our expectations (and hopes and biases) of a destination vs. the reality of what we found, and in measuring the person we are at home vs. the person we become abroad.”
― Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing 2021