When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
Garrison KeillorRead
Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Travel provides an opportunity for self-discovery and reflection away from one's past.
In this quote, Garrison Keillor emphasizes that traveling allows individuals to leave behind their previous identities and embrace new experiences in unfamiliar places. This anonymity fosters personal growth and reflection, as we can shed the burdens of our past and become open to the world, ultimately leading us to appreciate the journey of life in retrospect.
Themes
TravelSelf-DiscoveryReflectionIdentityJourneyAnonymity
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on the benefits of travel, one might quote this to emphasize the transformative power of exploring new places.
More from Garrison Keillor
All quotes →Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.
Garrison KeillorRead
I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.
Garrison KeillorRead
When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.
Garrison KeillorRead
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
Garrison KeillorRead
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
Garrison KeillorRead
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Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans.
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In general, in my life, one of the coolest things that I've been able to do is to go to different places and meet different people and see how they view the world and to learn what their music is and what their language is, and the food they eat and everything. That idea of the beauty of the vastness of the world has just been my life.
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That is the magic of travel. You leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity. But as you travel, the world in all it's richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in time and space. You return a different person.
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