Colin Thubron > Quotes

“A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.”
― Colin Thubron

“Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here ... and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world ...”
― Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“As the track bends north-east, the ethereal sandstone disappears. The slopes turn black with granite, and the mountain's lower ridges break into unstable spikes and revetments. Their ribs are slashed in chiaroscuro, and their last outcrops pour towards the valley in the fluid, anthropomorphic shapes that pilgrims love. The spine and haunches of a massive stone beast, gazing at Kailas, are hailed as the Nandi bull, holy to Shiva; another rock has become the votive cake of Padmasambhava.”
― Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet

“Once, at the dreaming dawn of history -- before the world was categorized and regulated by mortal minds, before solid boundaries formed between the mortal world and any other -- fairies roamed freely among men, and the two races knew each other well. Yet the knowing was never straightforward, and the adventures that mortals and fairies had together were fraught with uncertainty, for fairies and humans were alien to each other.”
― Colin Thubron, Fairies and Elves

“To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished leaving behind the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit boarders, unmapped peoples. The road forks and wanders wherever you are. It is not a single way, but many: a web of choices.”
― Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken”
― Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet

“I am travelling with this mystique myself, I know. It has grown out of childhood, and adolescent reading. This looking-glass Tibet is a realm of ancient learning lost to the rest of the world, ruled by a lineage of monks who are reincarnations of divinity. Recessed beyond the greatest mountain barrier on earth, in plateaux of cold purity, it floats in its own time. It is a land forbidden to intruders not by human agency but by some mystical interdiction. So it resonates like the memory of something lost, a survival from a purer time, less a country than a region in the mind. Perhaps it holds the keys to the afterlife”
― Colin Thubron

“Sometimes I feel it is best to experience as little as possible. I have become so accustomed to the sight of blood that this afternoon I witnessed the execution of two soldiers for cowardice. All that occurred to me was that their severed heads went rolling about just like dice. This only goes to show what I have always held: that horrors do not sharpen but blunt the senses. An old friend once set above his vestibule door the blood-soaked cuirass in which his father was killed. He put it there, he said, as a perpetual reminder of the horror of violence. And was he reminded? The first time he passed the vestibule, yes. The second time, maybe. The third time not at all, and thereafter he grew used to it, and was later killed in an amphitheatre riot with his fingers on another man's throat.”
― Colin Thubron, Emperor

“Just as the roads at Moscow's heart flow out in concentric ripples from the Kremlin, so this tension too seems to radiate from those secret and formidable walls, lapping outward to the suburbs and to the farthest confines of the Soviet Union itself, in ever-weakening but pervasive rings.”
― Colin Thubron

“A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort”
― Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet

“Its waters yawn with the same fathomless intensity as Rakshas Tal, but the peacock blue has deepened to a well of pure cobalt, edged by snow mountains that overlook it from one horizon to another.”
― Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet

“Sometimes, you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable.”
― Colin Thubron

“Siberia: it fills one twelfth of the land-mass of the whole Earth, yet this is all it leaves for certain in the mind. A bleak beauty, and an indelible fear.”
― Colin Thubron, In Siberia

“Se houve um momento fatal no destino da Rota da Seda, talvez não tenha sido a tomada de Constantinopla, nem o enclausuramento da China pelos Ming, nem o desembarque de Colombo, mas sim o dia, algures no século X, em que um chinês desconhecido descobriu a bússola marítima.”
― Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“Há muito que os comissários do gulag se tinham aposentado, com medalhas e pensões. Nem um único comparecera perante a justiça. A Rússia voltara as costas ao passado. Como podia eu entender? Desde o Holocausto, o meu mundo fizera da memória um dever. A Rússia, tal como a China, optara pelo esquecimento. Era assim que as pessoas sobreviviam, dizia o escritor Shamalov. Uma nação não se construía sobre a verdade.”
― Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“Diz-se que os chineses não amam. Os observadores das suas hierarquias familiares escreveram que a única verdadeira ternura que existe é entre mãe e filho. Outros insistiram que a palavra amor nem sequer existe em chinês. E é verdade que nem a abrangente ai nem o benevolente ren traduzem uma paixão incondicional.”
― Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“Tinha sido autorizada qualquer coisa a que eles chamavam Ocidente. Eu contemplava-a, pasmado, como um estrangeiro. No entanto, tinha a sensação de que o surto de individualismo não era exatamente aquilo. Ser ocidental equivalia a uma espécie de conformismo. Mesmo quando o Ocidente os conquistava, eles tornavam-no chinês.”
― Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“Em Samarcanda, dois séculos antes da invenção do telescópio, Ulug Beg registava a trajetória de mil e dezoito estrelas e recalculava o ano estelar com uma diferença de segundos em relação aos resultados obtidos atualmente pela eletrónica.”
― Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“The 130 species that swim the Amur read like a lexicon of invented creatures: the skygazer, the sharpbelly, the chameleon goby, the Amur sleeper, the three-lips, the eight-whiskered stone loach.”
― Colin Thubron, The Amur River: Between Russia And China

“officers sauntered the”
― Colin Thubron, Among the Russians: From the Baltic to the Caucasus

“A revolutionary is only a terrorist until he's achieved his revolution. After that he's a hero. An outcome makes a morality...”
― Colin Thubron, Journey into Cyprus

“The trouble is we have no education,’ he says. ‘Only that would save us. It’s too late for my father and mother–you see them–and it’s too late for me. I’m thirty-five. My wife too, she is quite uneducated.’ She smiles faintly. ‘But my children go to school now. We have hope for them, and for the boy. But five children is too many. We had them again and again.”
― Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet

“No, I had no dollars. The man struggled spider-legged away through the rain, leaving me struck by the illogic of things”
― Colin Thubron, Among the Russians

“Why can’t people ever record the good things, the everyday things? If there were ordinary accounts of the camps people would understand how we couldn’t always weep, how we came up out of the mines into the wash-house, singing. You’re a writer, aren’t you, so why don’t you write that? How we smiled a little, danced and sang a little. Because people must live in hope….”
― Colin Thubron, In Siberia

“Trekkers at high altitudes sometimes sense a person walking a few paces behind them, just out of sight. Often this person is dead. I never feel this, but once or twice I imagine someone walking a little ahead of me.”
― Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet

“From time to time we see hearthrugs moving over the slopes. With quaintly hunched shoulders and bushy culottes, these are yaks. In their darkly dripping coats they stand out like rocks against the bleached grass where they graze.”
― Colin Thubron, To a Mountain in Tibet

“Enquanto baluarte, a Muralha não fazia sentido. Os hunos, os mongóis e os manchus transpuseram-na quase sem impedimento. (…) Talvez, de uma forma não intencional, ela constituísse menos uma defesa física do que uma monstruosa delimitação. Separava a civilização da barbárie, a luz das trevas.”
― Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“I had a heady dream of loving her, as if she were an actress on a stage of my own making; and as the night wore on, my imaginings wandered into make-believe, and died beyond the tent of the mosquito net, where Vincent was snoring, and the African stars were shining in through our lone window, and nothing was quite real.”
― Colin Thubron, Night of Fire

“mountains, and cried: ‘That is the tomb of Kochoi, the companion of Manas!”
― Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“[In Georgia] A cheerful anarchy reigned.”
― Colin Thubron, Among the Russians