“Traveling provides occasions for shaking oneself up but not, as people believe, freedom. Indeed it involved a kind of reduction: deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper, the traveler finds himself reduced to more modest proportions—but also more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.”

—Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World (New York: New York Review of Books, 1992), 62.