It is an astonishing contrast to be going at fifteen miles a day one day and at fifteen hundred the next

It is an astonishing contrast to be going at fifteen miles a day one day and at fifteen hundred the next. I had so got into the habit of moving at the same rate as people did a thousand years ago, with the camels, that now I found it difficult to realize I was every day flying over new countries inhabited by different races.

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 310

Governing seemed to be a very difficult business.

I said to myself that governing seemed to be a very difficult business. To pay the troops who kept the dictatorship in power the people were heavily taxed and rendered discontented. This was the position in Khotan. On the other hand, when a government tried to conciliate the taxpayers and be reasonable about levies, it ran short of money and the soldiers revolted, leaving the town open to the depredations of mountain bands – Kashgar’s plight! Which was better? Peter was no interested when I raised the point. He was considering an altogether different problem, which was this: who would win an English law case in which a man, suddenly raised to the peerage as Lord Bognor, brings an action against a poet for writing a tragedy with a hero bearing the hitherto unused name, it being essential for the balance of the poet’s lines to retain the name? 

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 257

Peter thought me too serious and I did not understand British humour

We both liked to spend our leisure in the open air, he shooting, I ski-ing. … But then? Peter thought me too serious and I did not understand British humour (a serious a fault in the eyes of an Englishman as is it for a Chinaman to “lose face”). I had the bad taste to lay down the law about the art of living. Peter was bored by my craving to understand the thousands of diverse lives that make up humanity and bored, too, by my need to relate my own life to life in general. How could anybody be so crazy as to want to find out whether men’s efforts brought about an improvement in human nature? Peter was troubled by none of these things. In his imperturbable wisdom he looked on human beings as characters in a comedy.

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 161-2

I loved that primitive way of living which gave one back that hunger that transforms every morsel one puts under one’s tooth into solid satisfaction

Peter’s attitude was one of wonder at discovering the ways of the nomads, ways that are as old as the world. I, on the other hand, was going back to a chapter in my own history. In a sense I was only prolonging the journey I had made in Russian Turkestan. I was familiar with the smell of camels and of their fetid breathing as they ruminated. I had already joined in the halt at the watering-place, already seen the gathering of the dung for fuel. I knew the joy of drinking boiling tea, had assisted in the search for camels that strayed while grazing. I knew the silence at night, when one’s eyes are burning after marching against the wind all day. I loved that primitive way of living which gave one back that hunger that transforms every morsel one puts under one’s tooth into solid satisfaction; the healthy weariness that made sleep an incomparable voluptuousness; and the desire to get on that found realization in every step one took.

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 104

The real horror for Tolkein would probably have been that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse

The real horror for Tolkein would probably have been that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse, and genuinely thought the difference didn’t matter. If he got past that, he would have discovered writers contentedly using those cribs and ‘substitutes for proper food’ he had excoriated in his 1940 ‘Preface’, tracing his thoughts through flattening, second-hand, language-less and usually wildly incorrect ‘Encylopaedias of Mythology’. The end produce of book after book, meanwhile, is a scheme: The Lord of the Rings reduced to ‘archetypes’, related to solemn trudging plots of ‘departure and return’, ‘initiation, donor and trial’ hutching over banalities like ‘for every good… there is a corresponding evil’.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 381

Even Chinese food seems allied to the quality of the land

Even Chinese food seems allied to the quality of the land, It includes no bones, is prepared so as to be eaten with chopsticks, triturated, cooked for hours and hours in delicious sauces, and appears at last, looking like a variety of dumplings, served in little heaps in which nothing is whole and entire. Tou-fu, the sole diet of millions of peasants, is a kind of flabby, yellowish custard made with bean flour. 

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 49

Not one person in a thousand realises that rabbit (no Old English source) are in any way historical way distinct from mice or weasels

Rabbits are immigrants. They appeared in England only around the thirteenth century, as imports bred for fur, but escaped to the wild like mink or coypu. Yet they have been assimilated. The point is this: not one person in a thousand realises that rabbit (no Old English source) are in any way historical way distinct from mice (O.E. mys) or weasels (O.E. weselas), while the word is accepted by all as familiar, native, English.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 78