#tourist

They say you never forget your first glimpse of Gehenna. Over the tall buildings the sky swirls with orange and red, true titian, a feature of the unique atmosphere. Of course that same air would kill human beings; hence they built the entire city inside a dome. Eternal sunset, that’s why the place is so wild. You know the feeling you get, just before full dark? Sundown makes you feel like the world burgeons with possibility, and that’s Gehenna for you. Like any other romantic notion, it’s based on bullshit, of course. Gehenna isn’t the land of eternal sunset and infinite potential. The gas in the atmosphere just makes it impossible to see the sun. ↗

— Ann Aguirre

#tourist-brochures #romantic

I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#freedom

I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists. ↗

— Brigitte Bardot

#badly #behaved #dirty #i #i am

My only failure was the restaurant in Myrtle Beach. I kept it open for four years. It was in a tourist town, it was only busy four and half, five months of the year. But the bills kept coming all year. ↗

— Mickey Gilley

#bills #busy #coming #failure #five

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes "sight-seeing." ↗

— Daniel J. Boorstin

#active #adventure #expects #experience #goes

I quit flying years ago. I don't want to die with tourists. ↗

— Billy Bob Thornton

#die #flying #i #i quit #quit

The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#demands #destinations #disease #existed #his

Well, it was just, the bars was all just like the bamboo roofs and everything. You know. As I say, to me, it's completely spoiled all, all these places now. Make them all just tourist traps. ↗

— David Walker

#bars #completely #everything #i #just

I hope I'm not a tourist attraction - I'm sure that they come here really because St. Andrews is just amazing, a beautiful place. ↗

— Prince William

#andrews #attraction #beautiful #beautiful place #because

It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective. ↗

— A. N. Wilson

#alone #being #dead #eerie #into