Bruce Chatwin - The Songlines (1986)

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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

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

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

Bruce Chatwin

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

Bruce Chatwin

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

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

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

Bruce Chatwin

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

Bruce Chatwin