top of page
Exlpore more Travel quotes

"Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others."

"In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm."

"Ani saw herself clearly in that moment, as a face in darkness gains sudden dimensions in a flash of lightning - a young girl, a silly thing, a lapdog, a broken mare."

"I am disabled, so I can't travel, and I have not been to any development meetings, but Gary and the others affiliated with the film keep me updated on everything."

"I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench; - then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees. The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth."

"New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire."

"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 is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain."

"It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep."
Explore more quotes by Howard Nemerov


"When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats."


"I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks."


"Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree."


"I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow."


"It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page."


"I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try."


"Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?"
bottom of page