in Thoreau’s Journal:

I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those who perhaps will take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience…

I demand of my companion some evidence that he has traveled rather than to the sources of the Nile, that he has been OUT OF TOWN, OUT OF THE HOUSE, not that he can tell a good story, but that he can keep a good silence. Has he attended to a silence more significant than any story? Did he ever get out of the road which all men and fools travel? You call yourself a great traveler, perhaps, but can you get beyond the influence of a certain class of ideas?