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At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of ...more

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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as th...more

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Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even...more

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There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us ident...more

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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their bea...more

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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.

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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

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[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed fr...more

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We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble.

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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information...more

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If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthi...more

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... what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land u...more

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Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.