“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It
“That’s what I guess we all are; explorers in time, searching for that perfect moment when we know we belong when and where we are. And when we find it, we try and hold on and enjoy it as long as we can, because it may not last forever.”
from I Just Had to Go Back to Di Island by Anthony Bjorklund
– Anthony Bourdain
“My father started to cry and I realized that he never had cried when we listened to that carol before, when my grandfather was still with us. ‘Why are you crying?’ I once asked him and he said he cried because he was the oldest in our family, that he remembered how it was when he was in the pack, singing those beautiful carols, and he cried because he was the next man in our family to die.”
from The Pigs Slaughter by Florin Grancea
”…a lot of people have written about how he [Bourdain] lived doing all the things they wanted to do (“I wanted his life,” Drew Magary’s eulogy starts) but the more important and equally universal feeling is that of wanting to be more like him—more curious, more confident, more capable, more generous. Traveling the world eating and drinking well and making friends with seemingly everyone you come across does seem like just about the perfect life…”
from Anthony Bourdain Was Who I Wish I Was
As I’ve said on Facebook, I wasn’t a Bourdain fan. I hadn’t seen any of his shows or read any of his books before his death. I vaguely knew of him as a guy doing a food show. It is clear now that he was much more than that, and that I’ve been missing out.
Since his untimely passing I have read many quotes attributed to him and watched season 1, episode 1 of Parts Unknown. I will be watching more.
It was about more than eating. It was about introducing a new place, and new people, and showing that we’re more alike than we are different.
“Kids will learn anything they want to learn, anything they have a use for. But to make them learn things they don’t have any use for, you have to send them to school. We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.”
“Which in fact they do not learn.”
“Which in fact, when it’s all over and the last bell rings, they have not learned.”
Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael
