15 Book Quotes To Inspire Your Summer Travel

There's just something about summer that inspires wanderlust (probably the heat and the fact that you're just about ready to strangle the people you've been cooped up with all winter). If you've been in school all year, summer is an opportunity to strike out on your own for a few precious months. If you've been working all year, summer is an opportunity to quit your job and hitchhike across America instead (you'll never know if it's a bad idea until you try it). Whatever your summer plans, here are some quotes to inspire travel.

Maybe you're setting off on backpacking tour of Southeast Asia. Maybe you're headed to Philly for the weekend. Maybe your summer plans involve a hammock, a good book, and some virtual traveling. It doesn't matter how far you go, or even where, because we all need a change of scenery from time to time. Yes, when you return there will still be work to do and student loans to pay and parents to disappoint. But, as Jack Kerouac says, “Why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?”

1. I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.

― Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

2. I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

3. Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

4. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It

5. It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

6. What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? —it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

7. We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

8. It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, “As pretty as an airport.”

― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

9. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

10. Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

11. We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

12. A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead.

― Lemony Snicket, The Slippery Slope

13. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

14. Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

15. My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.

― Maira Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty

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