Don George > Quotes

“I stood there, battered by the raw power and sheer magnificence of a land I'd never known”
― Don George

“And I realized that people, from new-made friends to life-long family, inevitably come and go in the composition of our lives, but that once they have appeared, they never really leave. And I realized too that the people we love—the memory of the people we love, their enduring, pulsing presence in our lives—is like those violins. Every day, in one form or another, we take them out and play them, if just for a while. We become them, swooping, spiraling, soaring to the apex of our minds. We honor them and keep them alive—as they do us, intertwined.”
― Don George, The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George

“Ultimately, I have come to think, travel teaches us about love. It teaches us that the very best we can do with our lives is to embrace the peoples, places, and cultures we meet with all our mind, heart, and soul, to live as fully as possible in every moment, every day. And it teaches us that this embrace is simultaneously a way of becoming whole and letting go.”
― Don George, The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George

“Every day I was enchanted as I had been three decades before by the sweet, simple canangsari offerings—hand-sized compositions of colorful flowers on green coconut leaves, some graced with a cracker—that were meticulously placed outside my door and on bustling sidewalks, off-the-beaten-path foot trails, temple thresholds, and business entrances alike. And”
― Don George, The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George

“if you leave yourself at home and are eager to let the world remake you as it sees fit, you can be at home almost everywhere you go. Home is the condition, the state of unencumbered ease, you export to everyone you visit. —”
― Don George, The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George

“Food delights us, food unites us, food embodies the soil, the sea and the weather, the farmer’s sweat and the fisherman’s toil.”
― Don George, A Moveable Feast

“If we live every day, whether at home or away, with kindness, if we approach the world with a sense of wonder and curiosity and appreciation, if we encounter others with respect and openness, if we see our human differences as enriching rather than threatening, we will go a long way toward creating a world graced, interlaced, with peace and opportunity.”
― Don George, The Kindness of Strangers

“As we sat in the sun, drinking tea made from maple leaves (seasoned with apple and apricot), as we meandered through the 19th Century European park that leads toward the tiny lane on which our favourite tatami tea house is hidden – Don had come here ten months earlier after his Japanese father in law died - I thought how distinctive Don’s relaxed and responsive spirit can be. I’d walked these same streets with other friends for twenty seven years now, many of them celebrated travelers; they’d fired questions at me, shot out theories, spun this notion about Japan and that judgment.
Don, by comparison, hung back. He seemed eager to take in as much as he possibly could. He didn’t have agenda or preoccupation, and in that regard appeared to rejoice in the rare traveler’s gift of allowing the day and the place to take him where they wanted him to go.”
― Don George, The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George