More Non Fiction Quotes

Non-Fiction Supplement

Biology and Science

Whenever I used to think of fresh milk, I imagined rows and rows of chilled cartons of cows’ milk, neatly arranged according to their fat content or their added proteins and vitamins, and sometimes colored with chocolate, or strawberry, or caramel. When I was young, fresh milk was delivered in glass bottles to the front gate. Later it came from the corner store, or the cold food aisle of the supermarket. It listed nutritional contents on the label and the percentage these represented of the recommended daily allowance. It had a use-by date. And
it had to be kept cold. Once I began to breastfeed my children, my idea of fresh milk suddenly changed. Fresh milk is warm, and watery pale. Its packaging walks and talks, and runs, and makes love. It is absent of labeling. It has no fixed quantity, or set loading of nutrients, but ebbs and flows according to the needs of its consumers. It is flavored with garlic, or vanilla, or carrots, and sometimes all these things. It is not confined to fridges and stores, but is everywhere women are.
Fiona Giles, Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts (2010)
Is, today’s forensic science is built on innovations of the past. At the time of the Jack the Ripper murders, detectives did use several cutting-edge techniques, including crime scene photography and criminal profiling. Later, investigators would add to these, creating an arsenal of scientific tools that would help catch dangerous criminals. Techniques now include gathering trace evidence; testing bodies for poison; conducting autopsies; studying decomposed bodies; examining blood evidence; profiling criminals; testing DNA evidence; and analyzing bones, fingerprints, and markings on bullets. Put simply, forensic science is the use of science to solve crimes.
Bridget Heos, Blood, Bullets, and Bones (2016)  

FOOD and Drink

When you eat mussels or blueberries that you have collected yourself, or a vegetable you or a neighbor has grown, you don’t have to guess where your food came from. You are consuming it as close as possible to the point of origin, reducing processing to an absolute minimum. Eat your own vegetables and fruits raw, and you’ve reduced “processing” to washing. Eating wild raspberries from your own yard as you pick them is about as short a link to a food source as you can get—a luscious treat and the absolute polar opposite of modern processed food. My kids don’t ask me where these berries come from—they can see for themselves.

Twinkies’ ingredient list was long enough to include a good variety of additives, including my two top targets, polysorbate 60 and high fructose corn syrup. I also liked the idea of Twinkies because, along the way, I could explore some of the outlandish myths surrounding them. Twinkies are, according to urban legend, so full of chemicals that they will last, even exposed on a roof, for twenty-five years, and take seven years to digest. Some myths claim that they are no longer freshly baked—rather, that they were all baked decades ago—nor do they contain any actual food in them, but are the result of assorted chemical reactions. Or, as a character in a February 14, 2006, Doonesbury comic strip stated, baked only every February. I guessed it would be fun to see if there was any truth to these intriguing scenarios, all the while uncovering just what Twinkies are made of.

Steve Ettlinger, Twinkie, Deconstructed (2007)    

ALMOST EVERYTHING I LEARNED ABOUT THE BANANA was surprising. For all its ubiquity, the banana is truly one of the most intriguing organisms on earth. A banana tree isn’t a tree at all; it’s the world’s largest herb. The fruit itself is actually a giant berry. Most of us eat just a single kind of banana, a variety called the Cavendish, but over one thousand types of banana are found worldwide, including dozens of wild varieties, many no bigger than your pinky and filled with tooth-shattering seeds.
Everywhere bananas have appeared, they’ve changed the cultures that embraced them. In Central America, bananas built and toppled nations: a struggle to control the banana crop led to the overthrow of Guatemala’s first democratically elected government in the 1950s, which in turn gave birth to the Mayan genocide of the 1980s. In the 1960s, banana companies—trying to regain plantations nationalized by Fidel Castro—allowed the CIA to use their freighters as part of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

In the Western story of Eden, Adam and Eve are said to react to their nakedness by covering themselves with “fig leaves.” Fig greenery might cover the essentials, barely. Banana leaves are actually used to make clothing (as well as rope, bedding, and umbrellas) in many parts of the world, even today. In this case, the word for the Edenic fruit isn’t mistranslated, just misunderstood: Bananas have been called figs throughout history. Alexander the Great, after sampling the fruit in India, described it as such, as did Spanish explorers in the New World. The clincher comes from ancient Hebrew. In that language, the language of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, including Genesis), notes Levin, a word for the forbidden fruit translates directly: It is called the “fig of Eve.”

Dan Koeppel, Banana (2007)   

Choney takes the first share of milk. With a wooden pail hung from a rope around her neck, she aims to collect about six gallons of raw, whole milk to fill her churn for butter making this afternoon. Here in Bhutan, yak butter is a virtual currency, the gold of nomadic highland yak herders like Kado and Choney who sell or trade it for rice, tea, barley, and other bare necessities. As the number of these high-altitude herders dwindles in Bhutan, the appearance of yak butter—often bundled in thick green leaves and tied with bits of string—is increasingly rare in the towns and cities. Norbu’s parents can sell theirs for twice the price of cow’s butter made in the valleys. Locals place a premium on handmade yak butter not just because it’s traditional but because it’s considered healthier and better tasting, especially in their su ja (black tea whisked with butter and salt). Having loyal customers in the lowlands, Choney’s butter is often sold even before she’s churned it.

Elaine Khosrova, Butter: A Rich History (2016). 

One great misconception about milk is that people who cannot drink it have something wrong with them. In truth, the aberrant condition is being able to drink milk. Milk drinkers are mostly of European extraction, and as we are living in a Eurocentric world, we tend to think of consuming dairy products as a normal thing to do—something that is forgone in some regions only because of a malady known as lactose intolerance. But lactose intolerance is the natural condition of all mammals. Humans are the only mammals that consume milk past weaning, apparently in defiance of a basic rule of nature. In nature, the babies of most mammals

nurse only until they are ready for food, and then a gene steps in to shut down the ability to digest milk. Lactose, a sugar in milk, is digestible only when lactase, a genetically controlled enzyme, is present in the intestines. Almost everyone is born with lactase. Without it, a baby could not breastfeed. But as most babies get older, a gene cuts off the production of lactase and they can no longer consume milk. But something went wrong with Europeans—as well as Middle Easterners, North Africans, and people from the Indian subcontinent. They lack the gene and so continue to produce lactase and consume milk into adulthood.

Mark Kurlansky, Milk! (2018 )  

And food is not all that the potato will give humanity's planetary explorers. In space a sustainable oxygen supply is also essential, and here the photosynthetic process in which plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen as they grow makes the potato invaluable. The conjunction tion is fortuitous indeed: in the enclosed environment of a spacecraft, a stand of potatoes large enough to provide as much as each person needs per day will also supply all the oxygen they must have and remove all the carbon dioxide they exhale.4

Since then Andean farmers have raised hundreds of edible varieties - in fact, they have given over i,ooo names to the different potatoes they grow regularly, each known for its particular degree of productivity, palatability, temperature tolerance, disease and pest resistance, and storage quality. Many of the names are synonyms, but it is generally agreed that at least 40o distinct varieties of potato are grown in the Andes.

John Reader, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent 

Disabilities and Depression

I have schizoaffective disorder—a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, making it both a thought disorder and a mood disorder.  I reasoned in my mind that I was really the new Christ.  I was 100% positive of this, after I rationalized all the data.  And I was sure that if I denied this identity, that God Himself would strike me dead, and send me to Hell for all of eternity.  So, I chose to believe it, even though it was almost impossible for me or anyone else to comprehend.

My illness was so out of control that my life became haywire.  My delusional fairyland was extremely rough on me and all the people in my life.  I know now that these people only wanted the best for me, but I refused to accept the fact that I indeed was suffering from psychosis.  I thought it was easier to come up with bizarre ideas to explain what was really going on in my life.  But realizing that you are indeed ill is the first step in recovery.  I was not able to admit this to myself.  Of course, as you can see, this made it almost impossible for me to get well and obtain any sort of mental stability.

Stephanie Anne Allen, My Mental Madness Memoir: The provocative TRUE journey through my struggles with mental illness . (2017) 

The pain of depression and despair can build enough heat to melt the lead walls surrounding you. The darkness of charcoal, under pressure, can turn into a diamond. We need to realize blessings come in many strange shapes and sizes, and if we are willing to learn from our pain, then suicide is not on the list of options.

When you realize that those who admit they are suicidal really get our attention, you begin to see it is their way of filling the space devoid of love. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. So keep on loving until the person you are loving feels that he or she is worth loving thanks to your persistent love and attention.

Susan Rose Blauner, How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me (2009)  

Our family has had its share of problems, as all families do. But when I came along, everyday difficulties and disagreements skidded to the sidelines, while I and my problems dwelt unwillingly in the limelight; because I suffocated at birth, I have cerebral palsy, which makes walking in a calm, straight line impossible. My gait swings me from side to side. It is only with the helpful arm of a friend or an elbow crutch that my walking appears at all normal out of doors. Even then, I resemble an intransigent triangle, taking up more room than I should. In ultra-modern sneakers, I wobble like a drunkard, though other shoes are too uncomfortable to wear outside. As long as I have something to lean on, my wobblers help to straighten my back and take the strain off my knees and feet. They help me with the effort of walking.

Fran Macilvey, Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy (2014)

Growing up is tough for anyone. But when you’ve been diagnosed with autism, it’s an extra challenge. You have to deal with the negative perceptions and misunderstandings other people have about you, all at an age when you probably can’t even spell “autism” yet. This means you need to figure out your own strengths and weaknesses and how you’re going to use them. That part took me a bit of trial and error to get right. Our saga begins with an insufferable, catchphrase-spouting toddler straight out of a network sitcom and continues into the evolution of a hardened, vengeful preteen straight out of a gritty cable drama. (There’s a happy ending, I promise.) You’ll also meet my family—itself a microcosm of the variety of thought patterns and behaviors that characterize the autism spectrum. But first, one of the most formative experiences in a young autistic person’s life: getting a diagnosis.

Michael McCreary, Funny, You Don't Look Autistic (2019)  

Life

Garbage is the text in which abundance is overwritten by decay and filth: natural substances rot next to art images on discarded plastic packaging; objects of superb design—the spent lightbulb or battery—lie among sanitary napkins and rancid meat scraps. Rubbish is also a border separating the clean and useful from the unclean and dangerous. And trash is the visible interface between everyday life and the deep, often abstract horrors of ecological crisis. Through waste we can read the logic of industrial society’s relationship to nature and human labor. Here it is, all at once, all mixed together: work, nature, land, production, consumption, the past and the future. And in garbage we find material proof that there is no plan for stewarding the earth, that resources are not being conserved, that waste and destruction are the necessary analogues of consumer society.

Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (2013)  

People

“There’s that old saying about the people you meet in life. You can’t take everyone with you. You’re probably discovering that now, if it wasn’t clear before. Time gets away from us. It rips some of our friends away. People come together, they fall apart. But what I’ve realized, and what I hope you understand too, is this doesn’t mean the memories go anywhere or are any less essential. They are more essential than ever, maybe, because you’ll never build new ones with that particular group of people.
― Craig Davidson, Precious Cargo: My Year of Driving the Kids on School Bus 3077
How could any abortionist, much less one affiliated with one of the most prestigious hospitals in the region, have made such a mistake? What doctor or nurse would believe that a woman more than seven months pregnant was less than five months along? Like other babies born prematurely, I had a host of serious medical problems including low birth weight (I weighed 2 pounds 14.5 ounces), jaundice, and respiratory distress. But my troubles were complicated by the aftereffects of the poisonous saline solution I had endured in my mother’s womb. No one knew the long-term consequences of surviving an abortion. Developmental delays are routine for preterm babies, but I also had seizures; and the list of potential complications grew to include mental retardation, blindness, and chronic poor health.
Three weeks after my birth I was transferred three hundred miles east, to the university hospital in Iowa City. The nurses who cared for me, a nameless baby, made me tiny clothes and colorful booties. One nurse, Mary, decided I needed a name and dubbed me Katie Rose. For years after I left the NICU, my adoptive parents and Mary kept in touch, exchanging Christmas cards and letters with pictures of me and updates on my progress. When I got older, I wrote the letters myself; Mary and I began a friendship that would endure for decades. It made me feel so special that this nurse who had cared for me when no one else did still cared about me.
Melissa Ohden, You Carried Me (2020)

“After years of living in the absence of friendliness, after the toxicity with my family, losing my friends, the unstable housing and black mold, my invisibility as a maid, I was starved for kindness. I was hungry for people to notice me, to start conversations with me, to accept me. I was hungry in a way I’d never been in my entire life.  When people think of food stamps they don't envision someone like me, someone plain faced and white, someone like the girl they'd known in highschool, someone who'd been quiet but nice, someone like a neighbor, someone like them. Maybe that made them too nervous about their own situation. Maybe they saw in me the chance of their own fragile circumstances, that with one lost job, one divorce, they'd be in the same place as me.”
― Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

It was never my intention to write an autobiography. The very notion made me uneasy. You see them congesting the bookshop shelves at Christmas. Rows of needy smiles, sad clowns and serious eyes, proclaiming faux-modest life stories, with titles such as This Is Me, or Why, Me?, or Me, Me, Me. I didn’t want to do that, it’s not really me. And who

cares anyway? I don’t and I’m the faux-modest sad clown with the needy smile and serious eyes who has to write the damn thing. There’s something presumptuous in writing an autobiography, as if people’s interest in your life is a given. Fair enough if your life is full of orgies; and murder and murder orgies, you can assume a little interest from outside; that stuff flies off the shelves. However, geeky boy comes good? I didn’t see the appeal. What I actually wanted to do was write fiction about a suave, handsome superhero and his robotic butler. The story of a tricked-out vigilante, with innumerable gadgets, a silver tongue and deadly fists; like Batman without the costume and a more pointed ‘gay subtext’. Sure, it’s not particularly original but it’s far more interesting than my life. I don’t even have a robotic butler. Not any more.

Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy's Journey to Becoming a Big Kid (2011)

Reading and Writing: Dewey Decimal System 900 History and Geography

Reading and Writing: Dewey Decimal System 900 History and Geography

900 History

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

Why history? Why do some people love the past while others are enthralled with the future or can’t get enough of Tolkien’s Middle-earth? Why does science fiction hold so little interest for me, while historical fiction engages me? Who can say why people are drawn to machines, or medicine, or animals, or ideas? Rarely can we clearly identify the sources of our passions. It is actually easier to state why we dislike something. I suspect those who claim to dislike history have never truly encountered the past in a way that captivated their imagination. To me, history requires a great deal of imagination, and mine revs up when I start looking at primary source materials and begin asking questions. The study of history has often been compared with detective work. Both require the practitioner to make hypotheses and inferences, to think critically and to draw firm conclusions based on the evidence at hand. When the rote facts of history give way to multiple perspectives, conflicting opinions, and sometimes even mysteries, my mind is engaged and my curiosity piqued.
-Tim Grove, A Grizzly in the Mail and Other Adventures in American History

The best historians tell stories about the past—stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most stories end with a lesson or a “moral.” While a historian may not explicitly preach the moral of his or her story, if told in a compelling fashion, the moral will always be evident to the reader. We use narratives to make sense of our world. It is how we bring order to our own human experiences and the human experiences of others.
-John Fea, Why Study History? 

“The Art of Biography is different from Geography,” the humorist Edmund Bentley observed in 1905; “Biography is about chaps, but Geography is about maps.” For many years, chaps—in the British sense of upper-class men—dominated the stories historians told, to the point that history was barely distinguishable from biography. That changed in the twentieth century as historians made women, lower-class men, and children into honorary chaps too, adding their voices to the mix. Once we recognize that chaps (in large groups and in the newer, broader sense of the word) are all much the same, I will argue, all that is left is maps.
-Ian Morris, Why the West Rules--for Now 

 “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Mark Twain

Actual History: “I kept waiting for the book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else appeared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself. Besides, I was curious to learn more. The book you are holding is the result.”

“Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the disintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.”

“Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone.”

“In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.”

“The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”

“In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

The blizzard of January 12, 1888, known as “the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard” because so many of the victims were children caught out on their way home from school, became a marker in the lives of the settlers, the watershed event that separated before and after. The number of deaths—estimated at between 250 and 500 —was small compared to that of the Johnstown Flood that wiped out an entire industrial town in western Pennsylvania the following year or the Galveston hurricane of 1900 that left more than eight thousand dead. The blizzard literally froze a single day in time. It sent a clean, fine blade through the history of the prairie. It forced people to stop and look at their existences—the earth and sky they had staked their future on, the climate and environment they had brought their children to, the peculiar forces of nature and of nature’s God that determined whether they would live or die.
David Laskin, The Children's Blizzard (2009)

Historical Fiction: “They call this an orphan train, children, and you are lucky to be on it. You are leaving behind an evil place, full of ignorance, poverty, and vice, for the nobility of country life. While you are on this train you will follow some simple rules. You will be cooperative and listen to instructions. You will be obedient to your chaperones. You will treat the train car respectfully and will not damage it in any way. You will encourage your seatmates to behave appropriately. In short, you will make Mr. Curran and me proud of your behavior.” Her voice rises as we settle in our seats. “When you are allowed to step off the train, you will stay within the area we designate. You will not wander off alone at any time. And if your comportment proves to be a problem, if you cannot adhere to these simple rules of common decency, you will be sent straight back to where you came from and discharged on the street, left to fend for yourselves.”
― Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train


Travel into History: “So,” he said.  “You went and you came back. What do you think?”
“Al, I don’t know what to think. I’m rocked right down to my foundations. You found this by accident?”
“Totally. Less than a month after I got myself set up here. I must have still had Pine Street dust on the heels of my shoes. The first time, I actually fell down these stairs, like Alice into the rabbit hole. I thought I’d gone insane.”
I could imagine. I’d had at least some preparation, poor though it had been. And really, was there any adequate way to prepare a person for a trip back in time?
“How long was I gone?”
“Two minutes. I told you, it’s always two minutes. No matter how long you stay.” He coughed, spat into a fresh wad of napkins, and folded them away in his pocket. “And when you go down the steps, it’s always 11:58 A.M. on the morning of September ninth, 1958. Every trip is the first trip. 
It was as if 1958 were still right here, only hidden beneath a flimsy film of intervening years.
Stephen King, 11/22/63

Funny History: The leading contender in the first presidential election race was George Washington, who waged a campaign based on heavy exposure in media such as coins, stamps, and famous oil paintings. This shrewd strategy carried him to a landslide victory in which he carried every state except Massachusetts, which voted for George McGovern.
-Dave Barry, Dave Barry Slept Here

Interesting and Strange Historical Trivia:
The newspapers of 1838 were full of murder, violence and mayhem. Surely, the Queen herself would be safe from the murderers, madmen and fanatics infesting London and its environs? But her court at Buckingham Palace was run by well-nigh medieval standards by a number of inert functionaries, and no person was directly responsible for her security. Three groups of equally ineffective royal guardians operated independent of each other: the elderly and feeble royal porters, the royal pages who valued their night’s sleep, and the military sentries who did not take their job very seriously. This very slack regime was exposed by Queen Victoria’s determined young stalker, the extraordinary ‘Boy Jones’, who developed an obsession with the young Queen. Time after time, he sneaked into Buckingham Palace to spy on her, sit on the throne, and rummage in her private apartments. ‘Supposing he had come into the Bedroom, how frightened I should have been!’ the fearful young Queen wrote in her Journal after the Boy Jones had been discovered lurking underneath a sofa in the room next to the one where she slept.

Charles Dickens, who once visited the Boy Jones in prison, knew his story well. It does not appear as if Dickens ever contemplated using it for the plot of one of his novels, perhaps because his enemy G. W. M. Reynolds beat him to it. This is a pity, since the Boy Jones himself comes across as a mix between Oliver Twist and Barnaby Rudge: a twisted innocent left to his own devices in a dangerous, hostile world full of perversion and intrigue.
-Jan Bondeson,   Queen Victoria & the Stalker: The Strange Story of the Boy Jones 

Taking a Whack at the Truth A lot of erroneous history is passed down in books, plays, movies, and poems—usually these were intended to be entertainment, not historical truths. But some of these false facts are so ingrained in our consciousness that there’s little chance of the truth becoming as popular as the fiction.

 Here’s an example: What do you think of when you hear the name Lizzie Borden? Everyone chant with me:

 “Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one,”
Since she was first suspected of hacking her parents to death in 1892, Lizzie Borden has stood out as one of the few female homicidal maniacs in history—and if it wasn’t for this little refrain, her name would have been forgotten years ago.

What is forgotten is that a jury acquitted Lizzie Borden after only sixty-six minutes of deliberation and all charges were dropped. I hope the truth about Lizzie’s innocence becomes as popular as the song—and then we can all just bury the hatchet.
-Leland Gregory, Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Through the Ages

910 Travel & Geography 

“Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish."
"Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

 “The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

 “The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.”
― Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927

In the olden days a major drawback to traveling was the fact that much of the world was occupied by foreign countries, which had no concept whatsoever of how a country is supposed to operate. Many of them did not accept major credit cards. Sometimes the people would not understand plain English unless you spoke very loud.
-Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need

“The places we visited were always richer and always more intricate than one could imagine. I loved to find out about the world, the good and the bad, in this way. For me, observing things with my own eyes was the only way. My wanderlust was also a wonderlust.”
― Luke F.D. Marsden, Wondering, the Way is Made: A South American Odyssey

“Apart from the peace and emptiness of the landscape, there is a special smell about winter in Provence which is accentuated by the wind and the clean, dry air. Walking in the hills, I was often able to smell a house before I could see it, because of the scent of woodsmoke coming from an invisible chimney. It is one of the most primitive smells in life, and consequently extinct in most cities, where fire regulations and interior decorators have combined to turn fireplaces into blocked-up holes or self-consciously lit "architectural features." The fireplace in Provence is still used - to cook on, to sit around, to warm the toes, and to please the eye - and fires are laid in the early morning and fed throughout the day with scrub oak from the Luberon or beech from the foothills of Mont Ventoux. Coming home with the dogs as dusk fell, I always stopped to look from the top of the valley at the long zigzag of smoke ribbons drifting up from the farms that are scattered along the Bonnieux road. It was a sight that made me think of warm kitchens and well-seasoned stews, and it never failed to make me ravenous.”
― Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence

Moreover, she would be racing not just through space but also, in a sense, through time: during the seventy-five days of her trip she would experience the weather of all four seasons. It was a commonplace of world travelers’ tales that extreme change in temperature provided the perfect breeding ground for illness. Fever lay in wait everywhere; there was grippe in Europe, malaria in Asia. Storms, shipwreck, sickness, mechanical breakdown, even just a slackening of pace by an uncooperative railroad conductor or ship’s captain: any one, by itself, could prove fatal to her plans.
She couldn’t bear the thought of returning home a failure; later on she would tell the chief engineer of one of her ships, in full seriousness, that she would rather die than arrive late in New York. She hadn’t built her career, hadn’t made it from Pennsylvania coal country to the headlines of New York’s largest newspaper, by losing. What Nellie Bly did not know, though, as she set out on her journey (and indeed would not know for many weeks to come), was that she might well lose her race, not to the calendar or to Jules Verne’s fictitious traveler Phileas Fogg, but to a very real competitor. For, as it turned out, there was not just one young female journalist setting out from New York that day to race around the world—there
were two.
Matthew Goodman, (2013) Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World

The age of legends had passed by the time Peary spotted Crocker Land, but the era of discoveries in the far north had not. Whalers, shipwreck survivors, and adventurers had outlined only the fringes of the Arctic’s 11,000,000-square-mile expanse.
By 1906 there were few blank spaces left on the world map. Central Africa, the Amazon River basin, the high Himalayas, and Antarctica still had some uncharted areas. Unlike Crocker Land, none of those places held the possibility of a new continent with unidentified animals, plants, and perhaps even humans living on it. Outsiders had
not stumbled across northwest Greenland’s Polar Inuit, or Inughuit, the small tribe that produced Iggiannguaq, Ulloriaq, and the other people who kept Peary alive during his years in the north, until 1818. Why couldn’t someone else be out there, waiting to be found? Whoever unlocked Crocker Land’s secrets would join the pantheon of Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook, Lewis and Clark, and other legendary explorers.
David Welky, A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier (2016)  

914 Geography of & travel in Europe

The first time I came to Europe was in 1972, skinny, shy, alone. In those days the only cheap flights were from New York to Luxembourg, with a refueling stop en route at Keflavík Airport at Reykjavík.

For the next six hours I was secretly watching out the window for Europe. I still remember that first sight. The plane dropped out of the clouds, and there below me was this sudden magical tableau of small green fields and steepled villages spread across an undulating landscape, like a shaken-out quilt just settling back onto a bed. It was all so green and minutely cultivated, so compact, so tidy, so fetching, so . . . so European. I was smitten. I still am.

It was all so different: the language, the money, the cars, the license plates on the cars, the bread, the food, the newspapers, the parks, the people. I had never seen a zebra crossing before, never seen a tram, never seen an unsliced loaf of bread (never even considered it an option),
-Bill Bryson, Neither here nor there 

“Bollocks.”
‘It’s not bollocks,’ I countered. I had hoped this would see him off, but there was more.
‘Yes, it is. Nobody could ever get a lift with a fridge.’
‘They could in Ireland, It’s a magical place.’
‘Magical! So’s my arse!’

I let the subject drop. Experience had taught me that someone mentioning how magical their arse was tended not to precede stimulating and considered debate.

               When I woke in the morning, in a physical condition which seved as a reminder as to what had taken place the night before, I found a note by my bed:

‘I hearby bet Tony Hawks the sum of One Hundred Pounds that he cannot hitch-hike round the circumference of Ireland, with a fridge, within one calendar month.’

And there was Kevin’s signature, and below it, an illegible squiggle which I took to be mine.
And so, the Bet was made.
-Tony Hawks, Round Ireland with a Fridge   

IT WAS BILLED as “the longest waymarked trail in the British Isles.” Stitched together over the 1970’s and early 80’s, the Ulster Way turned a slow circle through the six counties of Northern Ireland, beginning and ending in Belfast, following coastlines and country lanes, forested paths and moorland heights, old canals and ancient pilgrimage routes. Depending on which source you consulted, the Ulster Way was anywhere from 520 to 630 miles long, a discrepancy that should have raised more alam bells for me than it did. If they can’t agree on the length, how can they agree on the actual route?
Fewer people had walked the Ulster Way then had climbed Mount Everest, and I couldn’t wait to end up in a bar somewhere next toa mountain climber. “Oxygen tanks, Sherpa guides, frostbite, snow blind, lost yer toes, had to cannibalize your team leader. Blah blah blah. Well let me tell you something buddy, I’ve walked Ulster.”

Will Ferguson, Beyond Belfast: A 560-Mile Walk Across Northern Ireland on Sore Feet (2009), winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour

915 Geography of & travel in Asia

 I started going to horror movies, [Where] I learned that Japan was not just a weird foreign country that had tried to kill us; it was also a weird foreign country that was for some reason under almost constant attack by giant mutated creatures. Godzilla was the most famous one, of course, but there were also hyperthyroid pterodactyls, spiders, etc., all of which regularly barged into Tokyo and committed acts of mass destruction. I imagine this eventually became so commonplace that Japanese TV weathermen included it in their forecasts. (“Partly cloudy this afternoon, with a sixty percent chance that Tokyo will be leveled by immense radioactive worms.”)
-Dave Barry, Dave Barry Does Japan

“What?"
"I said, Are you dangerous?"
I wasn't sure I heard her correctly. "Who? me? No, I'm not dangerous at all."
"You promise?"
"Sure."
"All right, then," she said. "You can get in."
And that was how I met the unsinkable, irrepressible, wholly undeniable Kikumi Otsugi, a woman who believed in bad men, but not bad dishonest men. I had given her my word of honor that I would not harm her, and she was satisfied.”
― Will Ferguson, Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan

916 Geography of & travel in Africa

To step into Kibera is to be lost at once in a random, seemingly endless warren of rank, narrow passageways wandering between rows of frail, dirt-floored hovels made of tin and mud and twigs and holes. Each shanty on average is ten feet by ten and home to five or six people. Down the centre of each lane runs a shallow trench filled with a trickle of water and things you don’t want to see or step in. There are no services in Kibera—no running water, no rubbish collection, virtually no electricity, not a single flush toilet. In one section of Kibera called Laini Saba until recently there were just ten pit latrines for 40,000 people. Especially at night when it is unsafe to venture out, many residents rely on what are known as “flying toilets,” which is to say they go into a plastic bag, then open their door and throw it as far as possible.
-Bill Bryson, Bill Bryson's African Diary

917 Geography of & travel in North America

On March 1st I walked over the Mason-Dixon Line and into Maryland, the second state of my traverse. This historic division of land was, and to many still is, the unofficial line dividing the American North and South.

The days passed quickly but the nights were not as cooperative. My mind was in the process of adjusting to the road. The realization that there was very little I could actually control in my new existence was hitting me hard. Putting one foot in front of the other was about the only thing I had a say in. This kept me up, tossing and turning for a solution.
-Nate Damm, Life On Foot: A Walk Across America 

“Mileage craziness is a serious condition that exists in many forms. It can hit unsuspecting travelers while driving cars, motorcycles, riding in planes, crossing the country on bicycles or on foot. The symptoms may lead to obsessively placing more importance on how many miles are traveled than on the real reason for the traveling...On foot, in a van, on a fleet motorcycle or on a bicycle, a person must be very careful not to become overly concerned with arriving.”
― Peter Jenkins, A Walk Across America

“After living in Smokey Hollow these three months my bearded face was darkened to a tan, and for more than a moment, I couldn't tell what color I was. Black is what I saw and what I expected to see. I grabbed a towel and rubbed to get a clear look. No, I was white. At least my skin was. I had been through so much with my family here, and all I had seen was black faces, that I forgot for a split second that I wasn't black too. For weeks after the flood in the bathroom, I remembered the morning I forgot my skin color.”
― Peter Jenkins, A Walk Across America

“More polar bears live in Canada than in the rest of the world combined, which raises the question, Why the hell did we choose the beaver as our national emblem? We could have had Nanuk of the North, Lord of the Arctic, as our symbol. Instead we got stuck with Squirrelly McTeeth. Sheesh.”
― Will Ferguson, Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada

918 Geography of & travel in South America

After receiving a very direct warning over the HF radio that we would be killed if we decided to continue our journey, we reach the downriver end of the shingle island in the middle of the Amazon.

‘Mira, Ed, atrás. Look, Ed, behind you,’ says Cho calmly. As I turn I see five dugout canoes coming towards us fast, full of indigenous Indians. Many of the Indians are standing up in the narrow boats; bows drawn, arrows trained on us. Those who are seated are thrusting hard with big wooden paddles.

As the boats beach, the tribe leap out and run directly towards us. The men’s faces are now taut with anger, eyes wide and white, and the women look possessed. Cho and I are unarmed, with nowhere to run, trapped at the tip of the island like animals. Every sense is now alert and our minds ignore all that is not relevant to immediate survival.
-Ed Stafford, Walking the Amazon 

For centuries, Mosquitia has been home to one of the world’s most persistent and tantalizing legends. Somewhere in this impassable wilderness, it is said, lies a “lost city” built of white stone. It is called Ciudad Blanca, the “White City,” also referred to as the “Lost City of the Monkey God.” Some have claimed the city is Maya, while others have said an unknown and now vanished people built it thousands of years ago.
Elkins had heard the legends, both indigenous and European, about the White City that described an advanced and wealthy city with extensive trading networks, deep in the inaccessible mountains of Mosquitia, untouched for centuries, as pristine as the day it was abandoned; it would be an archaeological discovery of enormous significance.
Douglas Preston, The Lost City of the Monkey God (2017)  

919 Geography of & travel in Australasia, Pacific Ocean islands, Atlantic Ocean islands, Arctic islands, Antarctica, & on extraterrestrial worlds

The fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins Down Under—not entirely without reason, of course. Australia is after all mostly empty and a long way away.
Its sports are of little interest to us and the last television series it made that we watched with avidity was Skippy. From time to time it sends us useful things—opals, merino wool, Errol Flynn, the boomerang—but nothing we can’t actually do without.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
THE GREAT IF OBVIOUS FEATURE OF A TRAIN, as compared with a hotel room, is that your view is ever changing. In the morning I awoke to a new world: red soil, scrubby vegetation, huge skies, and an encircling horizon broken only by an occasional skeletal gum tree. As I peered blearily from my narrow perch, a pair of kangaroos, flushed by the train, bounded across the foreground. It was an exciting moment. We were definitely in Australia now!
-Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country . Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

I stood for a moment gazing at the horizon we had skied over, letting my memory trek backward over the miles we had travelled. The cold burned the exposed skin on my face and made my eyes water, so I turned out of the wind and studied the opposite horizon. My imagination instinctively raced over the kilometers of wind-furrowed snow, creating mental visions of the landscape beyond that I had only seen on maps: an immense empty plateau, then a wall of serried mountains where the ice spilled between the peaks onto the ocean, forming a great floating platform – the Ross Ice Shelf.

Absently, I wondered how it would feel to set off towards those mountains. I felt a gentle pull toward that imagined landscape. Tired and aching though I was, I knew with certainty that I could continue beyond the Pole if I had the opportunity – but could I make it all the way to the mountains, and then on as far as the Ross Ice Shelf? Could I ski across the entire continent from one coast to the other – and could I do it alone?
-Felicity Aston, Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice ..

920 Biography/ Memoir

“Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.”
― Mae West

Biography: “According to Adams, Jefferson proposed that he, Adams, do the writing [of the Declaration of Independence], but that he declined, telling Jefferson he must do it.

Why?" Jefferson asked, as Adams would recount.

Reasons enough," Adams said.

What can be your reasons?"

Reason first: you are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can.”
― David McCullough, John Adams

“Always live your life with your biography in mind.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Autobiography: “What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is lead in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, (which are but the mute articulation of his feelings,) not those other things are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water-and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden-it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written.”

― Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain

So, there I sat, awaiting words of wisdom from a street-derelict that would hopefully chart the next course of my life. I sat and waited through seven more contemplative puffs until he spoke: "Well kid, the way I sum it up, it seems like you got two choices here. (Well, I already knew that!)  I think we should flip a coin. You got a 50/50 chance of doing the right thing. If it's ‘HEADS’, you stay in Boston at the music college, and if it's ‘TAILS’, you go to Venice, Florida to attend the Clown College!” O.K, sounded like a good enough plan. I took out the last quarter from my pocket; “HEADS” I stay in music school; “TAILS” I go to clown school. I flipped that quarter. As that silver-clad, two-bit, old portrait of George Washington spun high into the air, reaching its apex, the taller bum quickly stood up, “snatched” the quarter and pointed his finger in my face. "QUICK … tell me kid ... what are you REALLY wishing for - ‘HEADS’ or ‘TAILS”? I immediately replied, “I’m wishing for ‘TAILS!”’ The bum smiled and said, "OK, that's your answer kid … you’re going to Clown College!"    (He kept the quarter.)
Ron Severini, Ringling Remembered: Through the Eyes of a Circus Clown (2019) The Severini Company,llc

Diary: “The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Journal:

“We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trod. The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessels contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. However, as the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the coloring to events, when the imagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. Entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life. (Meriwether Lewis)”
― John Bakeless, The Journals of Lewis and Clark

Memoir: “When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

 . . . nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes

In Conclusion:

I Could’ve Added More examples
I Could’ve Added Less examples
I Could’ve Added Better Examples
I Could’ve Added a Greater Variety.

But what I have added, I have added.
Here it is.
I hope you got something out of it.
I got something putting into it.