"He had to wonder - why travel across oceans when across oceans when this vast and sublime world lived at their very door?"3rd person from Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good by Jan Karon
"Here lies the Bali dove
It does not do to wander
I think of it again."
Clementine Churchill, wife of Winston Churchill - This is an epitaph Clementine had carved around a sundial's base where a Bali dove was buried that she brought back after an exotic trip to many exotic islands in the world. She had a brief affair there . . .
"Lewis asks us to imagine an Englishman travelling abroad, fully persuaded of the superiority of English cultural values to those of the savages of Western Europe. Instead of seeking out the local culture, enjoying the local food, and allowing his own presuppositions to be challenged, he mixes only with other English tourists, insists on seeking out English food, and sees his 'Englishness' as something to be preserved at all costs. He thus takes his 'Englishness' that he brought with him, and 'brings it home unchanged.' " Taken from the book C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet by Alister McGrath
"Someone who has lived in many places' is not likely to be taken in by the 'local errors of his native village.' " C.S. Lewis, (1898–1963), British novelist, religious writer, and literary scholar
"The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet."
Bilbo in The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien, (1892–1973), British novelist and literary scholar, born in South Africa; full name John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. He is known for The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), fantasy adventures set in Middle Earth.
"The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." Samuel Johnson - (1709–84), British lexicographer, writer, critic, and conversationalist; known as Dr. Johnson. A leading figure in the literary London of his day, he is noted particularly for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), his edition of Shakespeare (1765), and The Lives of the English Poets (1779–81).
"There is another way of visiting a foreign country, and a correspondingly different way of reading an older text. Here, the tourist eats the local food and drinks the local wine, seeing 'the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants.' As a result, Lewis argues, the English tourist comes home 'modified, thinking and feeling' in different ways. His travel has enlarged his vision of things." Taken from the book C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet by Alister McGrath; The point that C. S. Lewis was trying to make by using a familiar cultural stereotype of the English tourist is "that to understand the literature of the classical or Renaissance periods, it is necessary to 'suspend most of the responces and unlearn most of the habits' that result from 'reading modern literature' such as an unquestioning assumption of the innate superiority of our own situation.
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