Tahir Shah Quotes

Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal.

If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.

Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.

Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it.

Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.

Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.

My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.

During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.

In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm.

On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.

In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.

There are two ways to find a lost city. The first is to rely on luck alone, the second is to control all the information.

Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.

My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it.

Ours was not going to be a clone of the usual expeditions, oozing with sleekness. It was clear from the start that oddity was our advantage.

Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.

My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought.Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind.

In India everything has a use and a value.

Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.

As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.

I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.

As anyone who's ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed.

For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.

Stories are a communal currency of humanity.

Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.

To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path

Because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we all have become lazy. Lazy people are like cancer. They spread. Before you know it, the entire country is destroyed.

The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

Respect was one thing. Survival was another. It was important that I kept my priorities in the right order.

Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.

The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.