23 quotes
The techniques of opening conversation are universal.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
He doesn't belong to a race clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at peace with itself.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
And now, our submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
He wasn't involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
I guess this is why I hate governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by the fine print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there’s an opening covey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)