Travels with Charley: In Search of America Quotes

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.

This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?[Also known as:]What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.

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.

Once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.

Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.

Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.