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Questions of Travel QUOTES

Questions of Travel QUOTES

1 " the twentieth century was best represented by an unwilling traveler. “I mean, think of the millions of soldiers mobilized by wars. And all the people made homeless because of them. Now the world is full of people who don’t belong where they end up and long for the places where they did. "

― Michelle de Kretser , Questions of Travel

2 " In the pub in Clerkenwell, it tickled Englishmen to ask, “Do you know the difference between Australia and yoghurt?” Or rather: Orstraylia and yogurt. They were hilarious, spluttering into their warm beer. There was another kind of man, whose methods were more refined. At parties, he would stand between Laura and the door asking, Which is your favorite Tarkovsky? Have you read Discipline and Punish? Whom do you rate more highly, Borges or Kundera? At confessional moments, angry names broke from him: Bellow, Roth. His brow might as well have been stamped “Frightened Early & Often.” Laura dressed him in a clean shirt rolled up at the elbows and placed him behind a desk in a room with no shadows. The luckless, passing one by one before him, wept hot, useless tears over their cancelled lives: they had mispronounced Coetzee or chosen Warhol over Duchamp. "

― Michelle de Kretser , Questions of Travel

3 " Tourists see invisible things. Sometimes their point of view eluded him. By now, he was often the first in the group to raise his camera: to a roadside shrine or a sunset, to a buffalo plowing a paddy, ribs curved like a boat. But why were the others laughing at a billboard advertising Perlwite soap? What was fascinating about two village women grinding chilies on a stone? The dust of familiarity still lay in patches on the scenes through which he moved. "

― Michelle de Kretser , Questions of Travel

4 " Wanderlust, on which the Wayfarer fed, was only lust, after all, lustily excited by penetration and veils. "

― Michelle de Kretser , Questions of Travel

5 " Wherever Freda Hobson went, she made herself indispensable to a woman she had selected. Men admired her, at first. Very young, she had abstracted the pattern of her parents’ marriage—the blade and the block—and rolled it into a tube through which to view the world. She had collected twenty or thirty close female friends, whose birthdays were noted in a book. Freda neither quarreled nor abandoned, but with each new friend something would happen to make her feel tremendously let down. "

― Michelle de Kretser , Questions of Travel

6 " With the revelation that arrived when the turned page showed the altarpiece at Isenheim, Laura didn’t presume to compare. A sentence was often in her mind: An eye is not a photocopier. It kept bobbing to the surface of her thoughts that year: a corpse insufficiently weighted. "

― Michelle de Kretser , Questions of Travel

7 " away is hard to go, but no one asked me to stay "

― Michelle de Kretser , Questions of Travel