Sightseers Quotes

Trains are great dirty smoky things," said Will. "You won't like it." Tessa was unmoved. "I won't know if I like it until I try it, will I?" "I've never swum naked in the Thames before, but I know I wouldn't like it." "But think how entertaining for sightseers," said Tessa, and she saw Jem duck his head to hide the quick flash of his grin.

Tessa: I won't know if I like it until I try it, will I?" Will: "I've never swum naked in the Thames, but I know I wouldn't like it." "But think how entertaining for sightseers," said Tessa, and she saw Jem duck his head to hide the quick flash of his grin.

I've never swum naked in the Thames, but I know I wouldn't like it." "But think how entertaining for sightseers," said Tessa, and she saw Jem duck his head to hide the quick flash of his grin.

Trains are great dirty smokey thungs", said Will. "You won't like it." Tessa was unmoved. "I won't know if I like it until I try it, will I?" "I've never swum naked in the Thames, but I know I wouldn't like it." "But think how entertaining for sightseers," said Tessa.....

The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

The Roman Road is the greatest monument ever raised to human liberty by a noble and generous people. It runs across mountain, marsh and river. It is built broad, straight and firm. It joins city with city and nation with nation. It is tens of thousands of miles long, and always thronged with grateful travellers. And while the Great Pyramid, a few hundred feet high and wide, awes sight-seers to silence—though it is only the rifled tomb of an ignoble corpse and a monument of oppression and misery, so that no doubt in viewing it you may still seem to hear the crack of the taskmaster's whip and the squeals and groans of the poor workmen struggling to set a huge block of stone into position——

However, for human beings, practice is much too tiresome. We want to show our appreciation like sightseers, without doing it ourselves. Like spectator sports, which are very popular, the Zen fad is really a spectator Zen or Zen sightseeing fad. Roshi, Kosho Uchiyama. Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo (Kindle Locations 2165-2167). Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.

The woods are so human," wrote John Foster, "that to know them one must live with them. An occasional saunter through them, keeping to the well-trodden paths, will never admit us to their intimacy. If we wish to be friends we must seek them out and win them by frequent, reverent visits at all hours; by morning, by noon, and by night; and at all seasons, in spring, in summer, in autumn, in winter. Otherwise we can never really know them and any pretence we may make to the contrary will never impose on them. They have their own effective way of keeping aliens at a distance and shutting their hearts to mere casual sightseers. It is of no use to seek the woods from any motive except sheer love of them; they will find us out at once and hide all their sweet, old-world secrets from us. But if they know we come to them because we love them they will be very kind to us and give us such treasures of beauty and delight as are not bought or sold in any market-place. For the woods, when they give at all, give unstintedly and hold nothing back from their true worshippers. We must go to them lovingly, humbly, patiently, watchfully, and we shall learn what poignant loveliness lurks in the wild places and silent intervales, lying under starshine and sunset, what cadences of unearthly music are harped on aged pine boughs or crooned in copses of fir, what delicate savours exhale from mosses and ferns in sunny corners or on damp brooklands, what dreams and myths and legends of an older time haunt them. Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship.

The distinction often seems precarious. Both traveler and tourist are, by definition, separate from their environment. We like to think that the role we aspire to, the traveler, has that distance on the scene that implies vision and understanding, while the tourist suffers the alienation of the passive viewer, the "sightseer." At its worst, tourism is felt to represent a moral or spiritual failing. And in our hear we fear that we, too, are tourists.

My friend Jim Richardson, a National Geographic photojournalist, likes to make the distinction between being a "traveler" and a "sightseer." According to Jim, a traveler seeks engagements with the local people and culture, while the sightseer just clicks off sights in the guidebook, a "been there, done that" mentality. A sightseeing photographer stands apart from the culture and "steals" pictures from a distance, while a travel photographer becomes involved with his or her surroundings and the people, and the resulting pictures become more intimate.

For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world’s affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence. For them the music was sweet and painful, the strolling chains of tourists like a Dance of Death. They stood on the curb, gazing at one another, jostled against by hawkers and sightseers, lost as much perhaps in that bond of youth as in the depths of the eyes each contemplated.

To step on board a steamer in a Spanish port, and three hours later to land in a country without a guide-book, is a sensation to rouse the hunger of the repletest sight-seer.

Suddenly I did not want to ask him any more. I felt sick at myself, sick and disgusted. I was like a curious sightseer standing on the fringe of a crowd after someone had been knocked down. I was like a poor person in a tenement building, when someone had died, asking if I might see the body. I hated myself. My questions had been degrading, shameful. Frank Crawley must despise me.

But how luminous are they—literally, how much light are they emitting? This depends on how massive they are: The mass of a star is the single greatest factor in how it lives its life, including its luminosity and its life span.

At Dniepropetrovsk the Stalin regime had made great efforts in construction. We were at first impressed as we approached the suburbs of the city, where we saw outlined the large masonry blocks of the proletarian housing erected by the Soviets. Their lines were modern. The buildings were huge, and there were many of them. Undeniably, the Communist system had done something for the people. If the misery of the peasants was great, at least the worker seemed to have benefited from the new times. Still, it was necessary to visit and examine the buildings. We lived for six months in the Donets coal basin. We had plenty of time to test the conclusions that we had reached at the time of our entrance into Dniepropetrovsk. The buildings, so impressive from a distance, were just a gigantic hoax, intended to fool sightseers shepherded by Intourist [Soviet tourism agency] and the viewers of documentary films. Approaching those housing blocks you were sickened by the stench of mud and excrement that rose from the quagmires surrounding each of the buildings. Around them were neither sidewalks nor gravel nor paving stones. The Russian mud was everywhere, and everywhere the walls peeled and crumbled. The quality of the construction materials was of the lowest order. All the balconies had come loose, and already the cement stairways were worn and grooved, although the buildings were only a few years old.

That Greiner house, now—a typical rung in the social ladder! The man who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he'll get out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and the few pause before.

A few mornings later Peter and Edmund were looking at the suit of armor and wondering if they could take it to bits, when the two girls rushed into the room and said, “Look out! Here comes the Macready and a whole gang with her.” “Sharp’s the word,” said Peter, and all four made off through the door at the far end of the room. But when they had got out into the Green Room and beyond it, into the library, they suddenly heard voices ahead of them, and realized that Mrs. Macready must be bringing her party of sightseers up the back stairs--instead of up the front stairs as they had expected. And after that--whether it was that they lost their heads, or that Mrs. Macready was trying to catch them, or that some magic in the house had come to life and was chasing them into Narnia--they seemed to find themselves being followed everywhere, until at last Susan said, “Oh, bother those trippers! Here--let’s get into the Wardrobe Room till they’ve passed. No one will follow us in there.” But the moment they were inside they heard voices in the passage--and then someone fumbling at the door--and then they saw the handle turning. “Quick!” said Peter. “There’s nowhere else,” and flung open the wardrobe. All four of them bundled inside it and sat there, panting, in the dark. Peter held the door closed but did not shut it; for, of course, he remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.

saw nothing finer or more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave. That illustrious place of pilgrimage lies out of the way, alone in the middle of the woods. A narrow footpath leads to the mound, nothing but a rectangle of soil raised above ground level, with no one guarding or keeping watch on it, only two huge trees casting their shade. Leo Tolstoy planted those trees himself, so his granddaughter told me beside his grave. When he and his brother Nikolai were boys, they had heard one of the village women say that a place where you planted trees would be a happy one. So they planted two saplings, partly as a kind of game. Only later did the old man remember that promise of happiness, and then he expressed a wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. And his wish was carried out. In its heart-rending simplicity, his grave is the most impressive place of burial in the world. Just a small rectangular mound in the woods with trees overhead, no cross, no tombstone, no inscription. The great man who suffered more than anyone from his own famous name and reputation lies buried there, nameless, like a vagabond who happened to be found nearby or an unknown soldier. No one is forbidden to visit his last resting place; the flimsy wooden fence around it is not kept locked. Nothing guards that restless man’s final rest but human respect for him. While curious sightseers usually throng around the magnificence of a tomb, the compelling simplicity of this place banishes any desire to gape. The wind rushes like the word of God over the nameless grave, and no other voice is heard. You could pass the place without knowing any more than that someone is buried here, a Russian lying in Russian earth. Napoleon’s tomb beneath the marble dome of Les Invalides, Goethe’s in the grand-ducal vault at Weimar, the tombs in Westminster Abbey are none of them as moving as this silent and movingly anonymous grave somewhere in the woods, with only the wind whispering around it, uttering no word or message of its own.

Nevertheless,” he insisted, “I’ve found wonderful material for my new book in all this. I think I’ve got a new angle on the social types of your East Side.” An icy band tightened about her heart. “Social types,” her lips formed. How could she possibly confide to this man of the terrible tragedy that she had been through that very day? Instead of the understanding and sympathy that she had hoped to find, there were only smooth platitudes, the sightseer’s surface interest in curious “social types.” Frank Baker talked on. Rachel seemed to be listening, but her eyes had a far-off, abstracted look. She was quiet as a spinning-top is quiet, her thoughts and emotions revolving within her at high speed. “That man in love with me? Why, he doesn’t see me or feel me. I don’t exist to him. He’s only stuck on himself, blowing his own horn. Will he never stop with his ‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I,’? Why, I was a crazy lunatic to think that just because we took the same courses in college, he would understand me out in the real world.

He shouldn’t be bothering with this clearly uptight, disapproving sightseer. And yet, here he was. Trying to get her to suck a goddamn lollipop.

[...] the sightseers prefer concrete. Think of their passion for marinas, not for boats, but for the car parks, the amusement parks, the proliferation of restaurants and blocks of high-tower apartments. They like to see the sea pulverized out of its natural area by concrete. They dislike the beaches for the same reasons; bathing in the sea is too uneasy a freedom, they prefer swimming pools. They like nothing better than to sit in their cars and look at the sea from the safe harbour of a monstrous marina complex

A story is told of a trip to the Holy Land in which the tourist group saw a flock of sheep being driven through town. As they watched, with digital cameras flashing, one sightseer asked the guide, “I thought the shepherd led the sheep from the front. Why is he in the back?” The guide simply replied, “Sir, that’s not the shepherd. That’s the butcher.” That’s Satan’s position. He drives and shoves us from the rear with reminders of our past, fears of our future and uncertainties in the present. He pushes through people and situations to lead us to the slaughter. Satan is the thief that comes to “steal, kill and destroy.

I think what makes good writing is intimacy—putting the reader inside the character’s head. Many books are bad because they’re merely guidebooks for sightseers.

I’ve never swum naked in the Thames, but I know I wouldn’t like it.” “But think how entertaining for sightseers,” said Tessa, and she saw Jem duck his head to hide the quick flash of his grin.

Terese looked away. Red double-decker buses flowed along the Seine, loaded up with sightseers. All the buses had this department-store ad of an attractive woman wearing an Eiffel Tower on her head. It looked ridiculous and uncomfortable. The Eiffel Tower hat appeared heavy, tottering on the woman’s skull, held in place by a skimpy ribbon. The model’s swan neck was bending as though in mid-snap. Who thought this was a good way to advertise fashion? Foot traffic was picking up. The girl who’d hurled the crushed can was now making out with her target. Ah, the French. A traffic officer started gesturing for a white van to stop blocking traffic. I turned and waited for Terese to answer. She put down her coffee.

On Monday mornings in nice weather, Diana would ask, “Where did you go this weekend, Mrs. Robertson?” She knew we made frequent trips outside London. Other English friends would tell us about their favorite spots, but Diana was not forthcoming with travel suggestions. At the time, I assumed that she might not have seen as much of England and Scotland as we did during that year. Diana enjoyed our enthusiasm for her country--its natural beauty, its stately homes and castles, its history. She must have smiled inside when I would tell her of my pleasure in the architecture, paintings, and furniture I saw in England’s famous mansions. She’d grown up in one! And she would always ask, “How did Patrick enjoy…Warwick Castle or Canterbury Cathedral or Dartmoor?” Patrick was a very good-natured sightseer. In return, I would ask, “And how was your weekend?”, leaving it up to her to say as little or as much as she chose. I would not have asked specifically, “What did you do last weekend?” She would answer politely and briefly, “Fine,” or “Lovely,” maybe mentioning that she’d been out in the country. Of course, I didn’t know “the country” meant a huge estate that had been in the family for centuries. Diana was unfailingly polite but sparing of any details. She considered her personal life just that, personal. She was careful never to give us a clue about her background. If she did not volunteer information, something in her manner told me I should not intrude. She may not have even been aware of this perception I had. I viewed her understated manner as appealing and discreet, not as off-putting or unfriendly. Clearly, Diana did not want us to know who she was. We may possibly have been the only people Diana ever knew who had no idea who she was. We welcomed her into our home and trusted her with our child for what she was. This may have been one reason she stayed in touch with us over the years.

By 2000, RMS Titanic Inc. had returned to the site four more times, using French or Russian submersibles. In a game of Finders Keepers, they pocketed more than 6,000 artifacts and displayed them in a museum, charging people to see them. The company even broadcast a documentary showing how it took the objects. All told, the items included eyeglasses, shoes, handbags, luggage, and even a bronze cherub statue from the Grand Staircase. A bell and a light from the foremast were removed, and the salvagers even raised a chunk of the hull weighing 18 tons. They sold pieces of coal from the engine room for $25 a block. They created a website, so you could peruse the collections online. Documentary filmmakers and wealthy sightseers visited the site in mini-subs. And, perhaps most grotesque of all, a couple were married in a submersible perched on Titanic’s bow. I wouldn’t think of a mass grave as romantic, but I guess some couples are into that.

so the pitiful citizens of this world spend their days biting and raging at the boundary fence that hems them in. Civilization, having given individuals their freedom and turned them into wild beasts thereby, then maintains the peace by throwing these unfortunates behind bars. This isn't real peace, it's the peace of the zoo, where the tiger lies in his cage glaring out at the gaping sightseers. Should one bar of that cage come loose, the world would fall apart.

Shadow On The Lake by Stewart Stafford Neighbour coughing up phlegm, As Stefan began his morning jog, With an elderly shadow escort, His stooping gait shocked him. Outcast sleeper in their lakeside car, Windows fogged with condensation, Homeless sightseer or lost tourist? Absconded prisoner, lovers entwined? He left the stranger(s) undisturbed, Pulling a sharp U-turn at the lake, His aged shape still fleet of foot, Dormant fugitive(s) eating his dust. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

For a century before William became its master, Cliveden had been open to visitors and sightseers, one of several showplaces in England that were in effect, and by long tradition, public parks maintained at private expense. The new owner enclosed Cliveden within a high wall topped with broken glass, forbade access to a spring of water that had been a local pleasure site, and erected a blank wall to replace the iron grille gate that had allowed a sweeping view up the long driveway leading to the forecourt of the house.

Amidst the empty conversations and meaningless hot air jabbered by the untethered tourists and sightseers, he alone walked on with his feet stuck firmly to the ground. His slender frame anchored to a spine of steel, he was a rock against the waves of humanity.

Trains are great dirty smoky things," said Will. "You won't like it." Tessa was unmoved. "I won't know if I like it until I try it, will I?" "I've never swum naked in the Thames before, but I know I wouldn't like it." "But think how entertaining for sightseers," said Tessa, and she saw Jem duck his head to hide the quick flash of his grin.

In Honolulu, Lieutenant Commander Suzuki spent a busy week. From occasional visitors to his ship he learned that the fleet wasn’t now assembling at Lahaina Anchorage as it used to. He confirmed that the weekend was a universally observed American institution. He picked up some choice titbits — structural data on the Hickam Field hangars, interesting aerial shots of Pearl Harbor taken October 21. These were made from a private plane that took up sightseers at nearby John Rogers Airport. Anybody could do it.

People who walk all the way to Santiago from France or somewhere beyond are usually considered pilgrims, but people who skip past the boring bits on a bus or train are lightweights, sight-seers, tourists. “Real pilgrims” take the good with the bad, they accept whatever the trail throws at them. They’re respectful, they carry their necessities and not an ounce more, in a bag strapped on their backs. They keep it simple, they don’t take the easy, or posh alternative. Rain, blisters, fierce dogs, bedbugs, blinding heat or deep snow, they keep walking. They’re vagabonds with a peculiar respectability, and a great deal of self-regard.

A deep, booming chime echoed through the square. It throbbed in the stones under my feet. Children cried, covering their ears. And I started screaming as I ran. ‘Marcel!’ I screamed, knowing it was useless. The crowd was too loud, and my voice was breathless with exertion. All the same and all, I couldn't stop screaming. The clock tolled again. I ran past a nude young girl child in her mother's arms as her hair was almost white in the dazzling sunlight. A circle of tall men, all wearing red blazers, called out warnings as I barreled through them. The clock tolled again and again. On the other side of the men in blazers, there was a break in the throng, space between the sightseers who milled aimlessly around me. My eyes peered over the vast dark narrow passage to the right of the wide square edifice under the tower. I couldn't see the street level there were still too many kids and teens in the way.

A deep, booming chime echoed through the square. It throbbed in the stones under my feet. Children cried, covering their ears. And I started screaming as I ran. ‘Marcel!’ I screamed, knowing it was useless. The crowd was too loud, and my voice was breathless with exertion. All the same and all, I couldn't stop screaming. The clock tolled again. I ran past a nude young girl child in her mother's arms as her hair was almost white in the dazzling sunlight. A circle of tall men, all wearing red blazers, called out warnings as I barreled through them. The clock tolled again and again. On the other side of the men in blazers, there was a break in the throng, space between the sightseers who milled aimlessly around me. My eyes peered over the vast dark narrow passage to the right of the wide square edifice under the tower. I couldn't see the street level there were still too many kids and teens in the way. The clock tolled again, and the rings cried out. Part: 2 Thrashed Just like me, this is not here anymore… It was hard to see now, more than ever. Without the kids, teens, and tweens, to break the wind, it whipped at my face and burned my eyes. -And- I for one at that moment could not be one hundred present certain if that was the reason behind my tears, or if I was crying in defeat as the clock hands rounded the face again, and the bell grew hazier. A big family of ten stood nearest to the alley's opening. The two girls wore blue dresses, with matching ribbons tying their dark hair back. The father wasn't small or big. It seemed like I could see something bright in the shadows, just over his shoulder. I rushed toward them, trying to see past the stinging tears. The clock hands spun, and the littlest girl clamped her fingers around one of the boy's long fingers.

However, for human beings, practice is much too tiresome. We want to show our appreciation like sightseers, without doing it ourselves. Like spectator sports, which are very popular, the Zen fad is really a spectator Zen or Zen sightseeing fad.

The first time I saw the picture if did not seem to me to have anything at all of the very great urgency and emotional charge of “Guernica”; Picasso’s deliberate survey of the two extreme states of the human condition appeared to me to have some of the weaknesses usually to be seen in Last Judgments; but whereas in most Last Judgments the blessed seem condemned to an eternity of boredom while the damned and their attendant fiends are filled with passionate life, here it was Peace that was convincing, while War, apart from those hands and the trampled book, struck me as literary and remote. Even the round-faced figure of War himself looked quite good company. I was tempted to say that Picasso, in spite of his longing for vast surfaces, could not deal with them when they were provided—that with the exception of “Guernica” his genius flowered best when it was confined. But that was a first sight, after a long day’s drive in beating rain; and it is notorious that a traveler, harassed by his voyage, by hunger, by other sightseers, tends to be captious and unreceptive—in an Italian journey Picasso himself saw Giotto unmoved—and presently, rested and fed, with the chapel to myself, I found the whole painting grow enormously in power, above all the arched picture at the end.