Jan Morris Quotes

21 quotes in 362 categories

• Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking…
• Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.
• There are only two rules. One is E. M. Forster's guide to Alexandria; the best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly. The second…
• I had reached the conclusion myself that sex was not a division but a continuum, that almost nobody was altogether of one sex or another,…
• I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.
• I’ve become obsessed with the idea of reconciliation, particularly reconciliation with nature but with people too, of course. I think that travel has been a…
• The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. A adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing…
• I know well the delectable thrill of moving into a new house somewhere altogether else, in somebody else’s county, where the climate is different, the…
• Movement was the essence of Manhattan. It had always been so, and now its sense of flow, energy, openness, elasticity as Charles Dickens had called…
• It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature…
• The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past,…
• There is always a sneer in Las Vegas. The mountains around it sneer. The desert sneers. And arrogant in the middle of its wide valley,…
• To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.
• To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment,…
• Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of…
• Indians love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic.
• Its smallness is not petty; on the contrary, it is profound.
• My Book and Heart Must never part
• The language of economics is seldom limpid, but in H Street they usually manage to remove from it the very last flickering colophon of charm.
• The pride and presence of a professional football team is far more important Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part…

Browse Jan Morris Quotes by Category