"The Art of Travel"

'If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.'

• The longing provoked by the brochure was an example, at once touching and bathetic, of how projects (and even whole lives) might be influenced by the simplest and most unexamined images of happiness;
• Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviation of what reality will force upon us. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetitions, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines... Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality.
  
• the distracting wooliness of the present
• Memory is in this respect similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
• a drum of anxieties revolves in our consciousness...
• The promised gems were blended in a stew of ordinary images... and that made the experience of travelling in the country seem strangely diluted compared with an afternoon spent in the Dutch galleries of the Louvre, where the essence of Dutch beauty found itself collected in just a few rooms.
• A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.
• New patterns of anxiety inevitably form on the horizon of consciousness, like the weather fronts that mass themselves every few days off the western coasts of Ireland.
• it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.