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All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.

Paul Fussell

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Paul Fussell
Age: 88 †
Born: 1924
Born: March 22
Died: 2012
Died: May 23
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Military Historian
University Teacher
Writer
Pasadena
California
Moments
Travel
Traveled
Recovered
Firsts
Places
Repeat
Pathos
First
Youth
Tries
Implicit
Trying
Behinds
Repeats
Traveller
Every
Behind
Irony
Successes
Never
Joy
Wander
Learns
Time
Wise
Thus
Joyous
Moment
Leaving
Traveler

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Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
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Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.
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Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it's fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.
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The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.
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The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.
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The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.
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Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.
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Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.
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If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.
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What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism all else is publicity.
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So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.
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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travellers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.
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If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
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And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.
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Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.
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Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.
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Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.
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Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
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