This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.

Dervla Murphy

Categorized in : Moving Past Epic

There are two phases of enjoyment in journeying through an unknown country - the eager phase of wondering interest in every detail, and the relaxed phase when one feels no longer an observer of the exotic, but a participator in the rhythm of daily life.

Dervla Murphy

details two country

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India.

Dervla Murphy

atlas india inspirational

Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner.

Dervla Murphy

partners events buying

The more I see of life in these 'undeveloped countries' and of the methods adopted to 'improve' them, the more depressed I become. It seems criminal that the backwardness of a country like Afghanistan should be used as an excuse for America and Russia to have a tug-of-war for possession.

Dervla Murphy

war country america

hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.

Dervla Murphy

damage hate hatred

one of the advantages of cycling is that it automatically prevents a journey from becoming an Expedition.

Dervla Murphy

cycling becoming journey

To me writing was not a career but a necessity. And so it remains, though I am now, technically, a professional writer. The strength of this inborn desire to write has always baffled me. It is understandable that the really gifted should feel an overwhelming urge to use their gift; but a strong urge with only a slight gift seems almost a genetic mistake.

Dervla Murphy

strong mistake writing

Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship 'economic growth' - the ultimate unreality in a finite world.

Dervla Murphy

growth sick reality

... strong bonds are forged in high emotional temperatures.

Dervla Murphy

temperature emotional strong

The Irish have a flair for wringing from death the last drop of emotion and they do not quite understand those who react otherwise.

Dervla Murphy

flair lasts emotion

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts, and a few days later I decided to cycle to India...However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.

Dervla Murphy

india ambition children

poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs.

Dervla Murphy

poverty simplicity needs

the sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.

Dervla Murphy

occupation loss home

perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood. ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling.

Dervla Murphy

artist children thinking

I wonder if those experts who tell us that our sexual appetite is the strongest know what real thirst feels like; I can imagine the desire for water driving someone to commit a crime to which sexual desire could never drive them.

Dervla Murphy

real desire water

Whatever the theologians might say about heaven being in a state of union with God, I knew it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly for ever.

Dervla Murphy

library unions heaven

Sunnis consider Shias a pack of unwholesome fanatics and Shias consider Sunnis a gang of lukewarm no-goods - there's nothing like religion for spreading brotherly love!

Dervla Murphy

shia brotherly-love gang

... I know a number of Western children who would benefit greatly if only someone were primitive enough to inhibit the development of their personalities.

Dervla Murphy

personality numbers children

With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology.

Dervla Murphy

two country years

[On Addis Ababa:] Among the city's handicaps are an immaturity for which no one can be blamed, as it was founded only eighty years ago, and a proliferation of architectural excesses for which many people can and should be blamed.

Dervla Murphy

cities people years