Bruce Chatwin Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other God.

Bruce Chatwin
As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

Bruce Chatwin
And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.

Bruce Chatwin
I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China and continue my profession. 'As sanitary engineer?' No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries in the world.

Bruce Chatwin
It's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home.

Bruce Chatwin
The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.

Bruce Chatwin
And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.

Bruce Chatwin
A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will.

Bruce Chatwin
Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security.

Bruce Chatwin
Wars, pogroms and revolutions offer excellent opportunities for the collector.

Bruce Chatwin
Finding in 'primitive' languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concepts of 'good' or 'beautiful', so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things.

Bruce Chatwin
Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land."

Bruce Chatwin
To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.

Bruce Chatwin
There is no contradiction between the Theory of Evolution and belief in God and His Son on earth. If Christ were the perfect instinctual specimen – and we have every reason to believe He was – He must be the Son of God. By the same token, the First Man was also Christ.

Bruce Chatwin
"Music," said Arkady, "is a memory bank for finding one's way about the world."

Bruce Chatwin
I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

Bruce Chatwin
I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

Bruce Chatwin
I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.

Bruce Chatwin
I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed's dictum, 'A journey is a fragment of Hell.'

Bruce Chatwin
The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?

Bruce Chatwin
Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.

Bruce Chatwin