Evan Rail > Quotes

“Once I leave — once I start the car or catch the bus to the airport, by which the voyage is initiated — my brain starts to relax at the absence of my things, and thus the familiar thoughts that they inspire. And it is not just about the books and trinkets on my desk, because a real trip usually means leaving behind innumerable other forms of familiarity: the faces and the voices that we know well, and which cause their own cataracts of memories and associations through their long histories with us. There are the sounds we always hear, and the recognition of what caused them, like the scraping of the gate at the construction site across the square from my apartment, which arrives every morning at 7 a.m. There are the quotidian streets of daily life, lined with memories of events at each address. The shops and offices we visit most often; the foods we buy, with their familiar tastes as we eat them. But as we go away from these things, our own thoughts change, or grow into the space previously occupied by the familiar. The light itself becomes different once we start to travel, as we change setting, latitude, or geography. And with these changes, with the disappearance of the familiar and its many calls upon our thoughts, we finally begin to think differently, or even just begin to think at all.”
― Evan Rail, Why We Fly: The Meaning of Travel in a Hyperconnected Age

“We want to sell ourselves the idea of travel as shown in airline commercials, the one in which each journey is filled with bright and vibrant stimuli and an almost mandatory sense of discovery: Travel is supposed to mean new foods, new sounds, and new friends. But much of the time, travel and the places we find ourselves as we travel are remarkably boring.”
― Evan Rail, Why We Fly: The Meaning of Travel in a Hyperconnected Age

“For what it’s worth, Dr. Verster’s list of drinks according to average congener content, from low to high, runs like this: Pure ethanol in orange juice Beer Vodka Gin White wine Whiskey Rum Red wine Brandy  Not coincidentally, the study lists the increasing severity of hangovers in the same order.”
― Evan Rail, In Praise of Hangovers

“And at this moment, we can experience something that spiritual teachers have told us for millennia: the joy in knowing that things are going to get better.”
― Evan Rail, In Praise of Hangovers

“People who travel for work usually jump on trains, climb into planes, and check into hotels so that they can do their regular work somewhere other than where they were in the first place. But when you are a travel writer, it is simply your work to go somewhere, and going there is the only way you can do that job, which recursively covers the hows and whys of going there. When you are a travel writer, the journey itself is much — if not most — of what you do.”
― Evan Rail, Why We Fly: The Meaning of Travel in a Hyperconnected Age