Sayyid Tahir al-Hashimi Quotes
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The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.
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I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand.
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For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
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In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.
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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.
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There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone.
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The model of publishing is changing and its happening right now, but most publishers are so frightened, they just dont know how to embrace it.
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Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.
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The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study's sake. There's no right or wrong, no pass or fail.
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Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.
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One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.
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A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you.
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Stories are not like the real world; they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside.
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There’s nothing quite like a good quest for getting your blood pumping.
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It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.
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Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.
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The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.
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There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one's elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass and discarded razor blades.
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There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.
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As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.
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For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.
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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.
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A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.
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The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.