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It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.

Tahir Shah

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Tahir Shah
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: November 16
Author
Comedian
Explorer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Held
East
Importance
Impossible
Middle
Overemphasize
Almost
Ancestry
Africa
North

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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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Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.
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Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.
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In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that i will come to no harm.
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Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does.
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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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To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path
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Stories are not like the real world they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside.
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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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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 India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.
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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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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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I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand.
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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.
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The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.
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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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Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.
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The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.
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A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it.
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