"Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race"
About this Quote
Travel gets sold as self-care and soft-focus enlightenment; Burton flips it into something prickly and vaguely accusing. Calling travelers “like poets” isn’t a compliment so much as a diagnosis: people who move through the world collecting impressions are also people perpetually dissatisfied with what’s in front of them. Poets, in the popular imagination, aren’t serene diarists. They’re restless editors of reality, irritated by banality, quick to notice what’s missing, and doomed to compare the lived moment to an internal ideal. Burton’s traveler is the same creature with a passport: always scanning for the “real” place behind the postcard, always annoyed that the real refuses to match the fantasy.
The line works because it punctures the romance of mobility without turning moralistic. “Mostly an angry race” lands like a shrug and a jab at once. Angry at delays and bureaucracy, sure, but also at themselves: for needing to leave, for wanting the world to perform authenticity on command, for mistaking motion for meaning. That anger is creative fuel. It’s what produces the traveler’s stories, like the poet’s lines, carved out of friction.
Context matters: Burton, a movie star whose life blurred work, desire, and displacement, understood travel as both privilege and exile. In a 20th-century celebrity ecosystem built on hotels, sets, and press tours, movement isn’t liberation; it’s a job. The quote reads as a backstage truth about glamour: the more you see, the less easily satisfied you become.
The line works because it punctures the romance of mobility without turning moralistic. “Mostly an angry race” lands like a shrug and a jab at once. Angry at delays and bureaucracy, sure, but also at themselves: for needing to leave, for wanting the world to perform authenticity on command, for mistaking motion for meaning. That anger is creative fuel. It’s what produces the traveler’s stories, like the poet’s lines, carved out of friction.
Context matters: Burton, a movie star whose life blurred work, desire, and displacement, understood travel as both privilege and exile. In a 20th-century celebrity ecosystem built on hotels, sets, and press tours, movement isn’t liberation; it’s a job. The quote reads as a backstage truth about glamour: the more you see, the less easily satisfied you become.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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