Nomads Quotes

“I built my home in the feeling of waking up at dawn in a new city, where every road is the right road because there is no ordinary. Everything is as profound as you make it.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“I'm packing my life in a bag again, saying goodbye and writing the last letters. It's been a long journey, back and forth, hide and seek, but this time it's different. This time I am different. I'm not sure where I want to end up but I know how to get there, or at least the first direction, the first turn, the first sunset. I'm longing for peace. I'm longing for borrowed guitars and detachment. Horizons, cheap whiskey straight from the bottle and your hands in mine.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“The Bushmen, who walk distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul's survival in another world. 'When we die, we die,' they say. 'The wind blows away our foot prints, and that is the end of us.'

Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians – with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds – project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

“The map of the world is drawn by travelers and nomads. Built into it are steps, nights and days, stations and encounters.”
― Jasna Horvat, Vilijun

“There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own.

They are the lordly ones! They come in all colors.

They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists.

They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor.

They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists.

They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humor and understanding.

When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically.

They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean.

They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion, or political correctness.

They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.

It is the nation of nowhere.”
― Jan Morris

“The only way to survive in a community where movement was the norm and material accumulation impractical was to maintain a strong sense on tribal solidarity by evenly sharing all available resources.”
― Reza Aslan, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

“The Wrong Planet tribe are the pranksters, the court jesters, the comedians, the Bohemians, the flower children, the nomads and vagrants, the free spirits. Without these the world would be full of humans who are little more than robots.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“There is a saying, if any stranger enquire of the first met of Maan, were it even a child, “Who is here the sheykh?” he would answer him “I am he.”
― Charles Montagu Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Volume 1

“They glided out of the heat-haze on their camels like specters. There were twenty of them, and they were Tuareg. Their faces were hidden by black veils that left only slits for the eyes, and they wore purple robes that fluttered in the desert wind. They carried swords, muskets and seven-foot iron spears, and wore stilettos in sheaths on their left forearms. They were an impressive, sinister sight.”
― Michael Asher, Death in the Sahara: The Lords of the Desert and the Timbuktu Railway Expedition Massacre

“I spent my youth like this, observing other people. Trying to learn how to live and trying to figure out how to be someone. But I never really found a way to fit in or stand out and I lost myself in the crowd and people's expectations.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“That still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way they lived: sitting on the floor, eating with their fingers, cooking and sleeping first in one room, then in another, or in the vast patio with its fountains, or on the roof, leading the existence of nomads inside the beautiful shell which was the house. If he had felt that they were capable of discarding their utter preoccupation with the present, in order to consider the time not yet arrived, he would straightway have lost interest in them and condemned them as corrupt.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“They find joy in motion, which transforms their lives into unending odysseys. Their souls are brightly burning streaks of light across the universe—constantly traveling in an endless dance across space and time.”
― Zita Steele, Dine: A Tribute to the Navajo People

“The Diné are children of the sun. They are rugged and graceful people. They love the radiance of color and silver, the purity of nature, and the speed of horses. They have a gift for adaptation and creativity. They do everything with spontaneity and flair.”
― Zita Steele, Dine: A Tribute to the Navajo People

“We drove to the ocean and smoked cigarettes until six in the morning when I fell asleep on your chest.
When you woke up I was gone and you went back to yours, and I keep having my best conversations while the world is asleep, trying to find myself somewhere between dawn and the sunrise.
Dear universe, may I never find myself.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“The last thing I want to give to the Great Master is a wooden plate inscribed with the word million . This word has been created all these years of my service with the Great Khan. Recounting to the Great Khan about his Great Empire I lacked a word which would at the same time represent a number, and yet so big to stand for the countless values of his Great Empire.”
― Jasna Horvat

“Land was to the nomads what a deity is to the initiated: one may draw on its might, but not lay claim to it. Amma herdsmen roamed the vast steppe at will in search of a green pasture and watering hole, with little regard for man-made boundaries. They questioned why a settled society should behave any differently, why one man should toil in the service of another merely because the stronger had staked out something that had never belonged to him in the first place.”
― Nega Mezlekia, The God Who Begat a Jackal: A Novel

“I used to hunt for shooting stars. To know they had traveled billions of miles, just to burn and be over in a matter of seconds… that was what mattered to me, really. Not the brightness or the wishes… Just, you know? To see the end of such well-travelled nomads. I didn't want them to die alone.”
― M.N. Arzu, The Librarian: A First Contact Story

“This sufficed: the overwhelming monument to the man who had not feared the poverty and grandeur of the steppe, so alien to all human measure. I breathed deep and tried, despite all, to salute life...”
― Annemarie Schwarzenbach, All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey

“And all is well and beautiful as long as I keep moving. Why do I ever stop moving? Why did we stop moving, us nomads? What compelled us to settle down?”
― Rebecca Schiller, A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention: Discovering the Beauty of My ADHD Mind―A Memoir