9 Quotes & Sayings By Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin was born in London in 1957. He was educated at Eton and the University of Sussex, where he received his PhD in English Literature in 1986. His literary career began when he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for "The Songlines", a collection of short stories, which was published in 1987. This was followed by his first novel, The Viceroy of Ouidah, published in 1990 Read more

In 1991 Chatwin's second novel, In Patagonia, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for travel writing. In 1994 he published The Songlines: A Journey on the Trail of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a collection of essays about the Andes, for which he received a "Writer's Award" from the Royal Geographical Society. In 1996 Chatwin's final book, The Mystery of queues and the Orderly Universe: Discovering Order through Complexity, was published to international acclaim.

This book became a bestseller and reached number one on the New York Times list. In 2003 he published The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, as well as two collections of short stories—Tropic of Capricorn and East

1
I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones. Bruce Chatwin
2
Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one. Bruce Chatwin
3
Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder. Bruce Chatwin
4
The real home of man is not his house but the road. Life itself is a travel that has to be done by foot. Bruce Chatwin
5
A journey is a fragment of Hell. Bruce Chatwin
6
Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin. Bruce Chatwin
7
If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison. Bruce Chatwin
8
Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence. Bruce Chatwin