Peter Fleming > Quotes

“The trouble about journeys nowadays is that they are easy to make but difficult to justify.”
― Peter Fleming, Travels in Tartary: One's Company/News From Tartary

“Continuous hunger is in many ways a very satisfactory basis for existence’.”
― Peter Fleming, News from Tartary

“The politics of Asia are richly encrusted with polysyllables scarcely pronounceable and so similar in their outlandish unfamiliarity that the ordinary reader has the greatest difficulty in distinguishing between a place, a political leader, and a prevailing wind.”
― Peter Fleming, News from Tartary

“[...] for the first few chapters the reader’s mind is full of extraneous and distracting surmises, as a proctor’s must be when he sees a chamber-pot crowning some ancient monument of the university. He overlooks the situation’s intrinsic interest, because he is passionately wondering how the situation was arrived at at all.”
― Peter Fleming, One's Company : A Journey to China in 1933

“The province’s traditions of hospitality are all its own, and the death-rate at banquets is appalling.

You never know what may not happen at a banquet in Kashgar, and each of our official hosts had prudently brought his own bodyguard.”
― Peter Fleming, News from Tartary

“The Tungans’ weapons were a motley lot. One was a Winchester .303, an old sporting model and clearly the legacy of an expedition. There was an ancient Japanese service rifle, several Snyders, a German rifie (1890), and a Lee-Endeld from the Indian frontier very approximately dated by the initials VR. But the most intriguing of all was a Remington marked 1917 and stamped clumsily with the double eagle of Imperial Russia.”
― Peter Fleming, News from Tartary

“He who befriends a traveller is not easily forgotten, [...].”
― Peter Fleming, One's Company : A Journey to China in 1933

“It may strike the reader as curious, even in these scrap-of-paper days, for the military forces of one Power to engage in hostilities on territory belonging to another Power without either Power saying anything to the other before or after the event. But Urumchi is a long way away, and there were no witnesses — no witnesses, at any rate, who could not be arbitrarily imprisoned like the two Germans and the Swede of whom mention has been made already. The illusions entertained by Europe concerning the ideals of the Soviet Union were preserved without difficulty from shock.”
― Peter Fleming

“The Tungans’ weapons were a motley lot. One was a Winchester .303, an old sporting model and clearly the legacy of an expedition. There was an ancient Japanese service rifle, several Snyders, a German rifie (1890), and a Lee-Enfield from the Indian frontier very approximately dated by the initials VR. But the most intriguing of all was a Remington marked 1917 and stamped clumsily with the double eagle of Imperial Russia.”
― Peter Fleming , News from Tartary