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[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.

Jan Morris

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Jan Morris
Age: 94 †
Born: 1926
Born: October 2
Died: 2020
Died: November 20
Author
Historian
Journalist
Clevedon
Somerset
Something
Citizen
Way
Travel
Citizens
Deodorant
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Ought
Undertake
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Fiber
Self
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More quotes by Jan Morris

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Basque is one of the world's more alarming languages. Only a handful of adult foreigners, they say, have ever managed to learn it. The Devil tried once and mastered only three words - profanities, I assume.
Jan Morris
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I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.
Jan Morris
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There are only two rules. One is E. M. Forster's guide to Alexandria the best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly. The second is from the Psalms grin like a dog and run about through the city.
Jan Morris
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To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.
Jan Morris
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The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.
Jan Morris
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Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.
Jan Morris
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I know well the delectable thrill of moving into a new house somewhere altogether else, in somebody else’s county, where the climate is different, the food is different, the light is different, where the mundane preoccupations of life at home don’t seem to apply and it is even fun to go shopping.
Jan Morris
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Indians love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic.
Jan Morris
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The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.
Jan Morris
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I’ve become obsessed with the idea of reconciliation, particularly reconciliation with nature but with people too, of course. I think that travel has been a kind of search for that, a pursuit for unity and even an attempt to contribute to a sense of unity.
Jan Morris
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Vermonters, it seems to me, are like ethnics in their own land. They are exceedingly conscious of their difference from other Americans, and they talk a great deal about outsiders, newcomers, and people from the south.
Jan Morris
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Worldwide travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all-certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia.
Jan Morris
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Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.
Jan Morris
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I am when the Chinese, who know everything, build a house, they consult the precepts of an ancient science, Feng Shui, which tells them exactly how, when, and where the work must be done, and so brings good fortune to the home forever.
Jan Morris
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I half cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.
Jan Morris
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Was there ever a name more full of purpose than Chicago's? ... spoken as Chicagoans themselves speak it, with a bit of a spit to give heft to its slither, it is gloriously onomatopoetic.
Jan Morris
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As to sex, the original pleasure, I cannot recommend too highly the advantages of androgyny.
Jan Morris
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the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.
Jan Morris
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Vermonters are not only charmless of manner, on the whole they are also, as far as I can judge, utterly without pretence, and give the salutary impression that they don't care ten cents whether you are amused, affronted, intrigued, or bored stiff by them. Hardly anybody asked me how I liked Vermont. Not a soul said 'Have a nice day!
Jan Morris
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It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest.
Jan Morris