The tourist is first of all an adventurer. The dream is of the pioneer, the explorer, the great voyager or the conquering emperor.... He leaves the security of home far behind and sets out beyond the perimeters of the known world for fame, fortune and excitement. He wants to take on the minotaur, scale the Matterhorn, discover a lost Amazonian tribe or sample the delights of a Thai brothel.... The essence of the tourist adventure is exhibited in the contours of the excitements that it provides. And these contours are best inferred from the stories that are told and re-told with animation to relatives, friends and colleagues at home. It is virtually never what has been seen that is recounted with enthusiasm. When the sites are described it is in the form of ritualized cliches: the Eiffel Tower really is a wonder--we went up it, and you get such a nice view. It is rather the personal moments of the tour, moments of near-crisis, that in retrospect were exciting: when one of the suitcases failed to arrive off the luggage chute at Frankfort Airport. Touring itself has been turned into a routine, restricting adventure to those moments when routine breaks down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it--an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it;... a point of view.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I see two dingy little rooms with "FOR LADIES" swinging over one and "FOR COLORED PEOPLE" over the other; while wondering under wh...ich head I come, I notice a little way off the only hotel proprietor of the place whittling a pine stick as he sits with one leg thrown across an empty goods box; and as my eye falls on a sample room next door which seems to be driving the only wide-awake and popular business of the commonwealth, I cannot help ejaculating under my breath, "What a field for the missionary woman."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have been made to believe in this democracy thing, and I am all for tasting this democracy out. The flavor must be good. If the ...Occident is so intent in keeping the taste out of darker mouths that it spends all those billions and expends all those billions and expends all those millions of lives, colored ones too, to keep it among themselves, then it must be something good. I crave to sample this gorgeous thing. So I cannot say anything different from repeal of all Jim Crow laws! Not in some future generation, but repeal now and forever!!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The present war having so long cut off all communication with Great-Britain, we are not able to make a fair estimate of the state ...of science in that country. The spirit in which she wages war is the only sample before our eyes, and that does not seem the legitimate offspring either of science or of civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make ...it the representative of a whole class.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A slight digression: that bit about my mother was a deliberate lie. In reality, she was a woman of the people, simple and coarse, ...sordidly dressed in a kind of blouse hanging loose at the waist. I could, of course, have crossed it out, but I purposely leave it there as a sample of one of my essential traits: my light-hearted, inspired lying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is un...liveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Captain Quinlan: When this case is over, I'll come around some night and sample some of your chili. Tanya: Better be careful.... May be too hot for you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at s...ome homely girl.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »