TBEX ’10 Revisited: Seven Quotations on Writing and Travel
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 07.01.10 | 11:43 AM ET
I gave a talk last weekend at the Travel Blog Exchange conference in New York on travel writing and the story of World Hum. At the end of it, I shared several of my favorite quotations that I think help explain why so many of us are drawn to traveling and telling stories about our travels.
Several people have asked for them, so without further delay, here they are:
- “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”—Ursula K. LeGuin
- “To be a person is to have a story to tell.”—Isak Dinesen
- “Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.”—Robert McKee
- “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”—Joan Didion
- “If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”—Barry Lopez
- “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.”—Freya Stark
- “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”—Bill Bryson
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
Mike Barish 07.01.10 | 11:56 AM ET
Love the Freya Stark quote. Thanks, Jim. Now share those tweets that you mentioned in that same talk!
Spud Hilton 07.01.10 | 11:58 AM ET
Great stuff, Jim. Was afraid you were going to put up the unearthed tweets. The Bryson quote is pretty much why I don’t take destination travel stories from writers who LIVE in the destination. No sense of wonder in the storytelling.
Jim Benning 07.01.10 | 12:16 PM ET
Thanks, guys.
Good point about a sense of wonder, Spud. The tweets are coming!
Mikeachim 07.01.10 | 12:43 PM ET
I’ve spent years retelling that LeGuin quote to anyone unwise enough to be near me when I’ve had something to drink, or daft enough to suggest stories are dead within earshot.
To quote another fellow Brit - all the world’s a stage.
Nancy Harder 07.02.10 | 3:05 PM ET
Freya Stark and Bill Bryson’s quotes codify travel for me. Great quotes and talk, Jim. Enjoyed your insight and your mad lost tweet sleuthing skills.