21 Travel Books to Get Rid of Your Quarantine Blues

Books are written and movies made, to prove you can travel into the unknown, venture into the beyond and escape the limitations of a normal life all while staying where you are — only to leave you inspired to go out there and explore.

And some profoundly connect with the smell of a book’s withered papers than the narratives of any movie, however gripping. And for you, those lovers of books, I’ve created a list of some best travel-inspired movies. After all, life is too short for bad books and bad coffee!

1. The Alchemist

2. The Lord of the Rings

“Not all those who wander are lost”

3. The Motorcycle Diaries

“Let the world change you and you can change the world.”

4. Wild: From Lost to Found

“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”

5. The Adventures of Tintin

Tintin: “How’s your thirst for adventure, Captain?”
Captain Haddock: “Unquenchable, Tintin.”

6. Robinson Crusoe

“The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear..”

7. Vagabonding

“The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.”

8. The Beach

“If I’d learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don’t talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.”

9. Turn Right at Machu Picchu

“If you’ve ever thought, ‘The new Times Square is delightful but would be even better if it were more claustrophobic and nearly impossible to leave’, the Aguas Calientes is calling your name.”

10. Seven Years in Tibet

“There were only three names on the map of the region we had brought with us, but we now filled in more than two hundred.”

11. Down Under

“And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains…”

12. Arabian Sands

“I tasted freedom and a way of life from which there could be no recall.”

13. Blue Highways

“When you’re traveling, you are what you are, right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

14. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

“The moment I stopped spending so much time chasing the big pleasure of life. I began to enjoy the little ones, like watching the stars dancing in moonlit sky or soaking in the sunbeams of a glorious summer morning.”

15. Eat, Pray, Love

“You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”

16. The Rings of Saturn

“This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.”

17. Around the World in Eighty Days

“I see that it is by no means useless to travel, if a man wants to see something new.”

18. Walking the Himalayas

“The simplicity, the lack of choice, of having to make do, that’s what happiness is all about. Look!”

19. Into Thin Air

“Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.”

20. Lost Horizon

“People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.”

21. A Walk in the Woods

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.”

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Like this list? Add your favourite travel book in the comments! For more travel inspiration, follow Pickyourtrail.