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Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.

Tahir Shah

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Tahir Shah
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: November 16
Author
Comedian
Explorer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
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Select
People
Hardship
Nerves
Pretend
Iron
Endure
Explorers
Terrible
Breed
Ability
Nerve

More quotes by Tahir Shah

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Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.
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It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.
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In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.
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These days no one challenges us,' he said. 'And because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we have all become lazy.
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Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
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The backstreet cafe in Casablanca was for me a place of mystery, a place with a soul, a place with danger. There was a sense that the safety nets had been cut away, that each citizen walked upon the high wire of this, the real world. I longed not merely to travel through it, but to live in such a city.
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If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.
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To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path
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The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.
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There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.
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To be selfless, you would give charity anonymously, walj softly on the earth, and look out for others-even total strangers-before you look out for yourself. For the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an impediment, in humanity's quest foe real progress.
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Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.
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The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after two minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.
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In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.
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During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.
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The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.
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Foras Road has a sordid reputation (…) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.
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For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
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For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.
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Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else.
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