Robert W. Service Quotes

Everything I pick up seems to lure me away. Everything I do in my daily life begins to feel like striking wet matches. The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to 'go' runs through me equally with an intense desire to 'stay' at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle. When I travel, I think of home and what it means. At home I'm dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of Old Europe, or pushing open shutters to see Florence awaken. The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport.

When I've got time off, my feet get itchy really quickly.

Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

I have a terrible wanderthirst; the very sight of a map makes me want to put on my hat and take an umbrella and start. I shall see before I die the palms and temples of the South.

A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.

I'm dying to go to India.

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

I remember just lying in the grass, staring at the clouds, wondering where they drifted off to after they floated over Texas. I never would have imagined that one day I would follow one of those clouds and find myself in Hollywood.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

I really wish we could stay longer in the countries we visit, but I've been lucky to have visited most of them before, because I've done a tremendous amount of travel.

Even if he was happier in Asia than he'd been in Latin America, the wanderlust still worked on my father's insides like a disease. One of the most recurrent memories of my childhood is of him sitting in his armchair in the evenings, poring over atlases the way other fathers read newspapers or books.

I love new cities, and if I haven't travelled for a month, the need to go somewhere starts to gets under my skin.

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

I always had a sort of niggling regret that we didn't come do stuff in America.

I go to many different places many times, but I miss my house constantly.

It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.

I don't like being in one place too long. Five days just about does it for me because I have a very low threshold for boredom.

Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.

Travel is as much a passion as ambition or love.

Traveling around sure gets me down and lonely, nothing else to do but close my mind. I sure hope the road don't come to own me, there's so many dreams I've yet to find. But you're so far away.

Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood

A nomad I was even when I was very small and would stare at the road, that white spellbinding road headed straight for the unknown ... a nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.

Do you remember the church across the sands? You stood outside and planned to travel the lands, where the pilgrims go. So you packed your world up inside a canvas sack, set off down the highway with your rings and Kerouac. Someone said they saw you in Nepal a long time back. Tell me why you look away, don't you have a word to say?