The pull to leave, and the pull to stay
I started saving travel quotes after my brother died. The pull to leave and the pull to stay still both fit at once. This is how Quotes on Travel started.
I do not write that for sympathy, and I will not dwell on it here. I say it because it is the honest root of this whole thing, and because the two pulls it left me with never fully resolved. For a long time I stayed close on purpose. When that reason was gone, the pull to go, the one I had been holding down, got too strong to keep ignoring. The words I had been quietly collecting were the ones that seemed to hold both feelings at the same time. That is where Quotes on Travel actually comes from.
Coming home was the hard part
Here is the part I think you might recognise, if you have found your way to a site about travel quotes on a normal working day.
I studied Hospitality and Tourism, then did a study exchange at FIU in Miami. Coming home, I was back in the same routine inside a week.
The trip was never the hard part. Coming home was. Inside a week I was back at the front desk, back on the roster, back in the routine, like the whole thing had happened to someone else. Friends picked me up, the first night out was loud and good, and then the excitement drained faster than I expected. And underneath it a quiet question that would not leave: is this the best it gets.
If you are somewhere in your late thirties or forties, doing well by every outside measure, and still asking that question on a Tuesday, I am not going to pretend I have not sat in the same chair. This is a site for that question, not a lecture about it.
A $3,000 website, and the first time I saw what was possible
After I lost a hotel job, I moved back to my childhood town and taught myself digital off a $3,000 website my parents backed. It was the first time I saw what was actually possible online.
That site was not a success. It was an education. I learned how to build and run a website, I learned a lot about how not to treat customers by being on the wrong end of it, and it got me my first real job in digital. My parents lent me the money to buy it, which is not a detail I take lightly. It was the first time the internet stopped being a place I read things and became a place I could make things.
I will be honest about the shape of what came next, because the honesty is the point of this page. I chased a few shiny things that promised shortcuts, and none of them stuck. What actually moved anything was far more boring: following through on one thing long enough for it to work, and only doing it when the pull to do it was real. I am a sales-and-marketing operator who learned digital by doing, across about ten years and half a dozen companies. That is the credential. Not a title, just the work.
The books that gave me the words
Two books did something quotes had been doing for me for years, only louder.
Ferriss and Potts gave me the words: the trip I wanted was not a holiday, it was a rearrangement of how life is structured.
That was the shift. Not a seminar, not a mindset weekend, just two writers naming a thing I had felt and could not phrase. The trip I actually wanted could not be booked, because it was not a trip. It was a different arrangement of the ordinary week. Once you see it that way you cannot unsee it, and most of what I have built since has been an attempt to test whether that arrangement is real or just a nice sentence.
The part I will say plainly about money
Since this is a site partly about stepping off the expected path, here is the truth about my reasons rather than a highlight reel.
I make good six figures in sales, and no, my finances are not perfect. I am not chasing this because the money is bad. I am chasing it because the pull to explore is stronger than a good salary, and it has never gone quiet.
I mention it once, and only here, for one reason. A lot of writing about escaping the desk quietly assumes you are unhappy or underpaid, and neither is true for me, and I suspect neither is true for you. The handcuffs are not the salary. The handcuffs are that the salary is good enough to make the question feel ungrateful. I do not think it is ungrateful. I think it is the most honest question you can ask when the outside scoreboard says you have already won.
Where it started to get real…
I would rather show you that the life is possible than tell you what it paid, so here is the honest version, the places and the work. I have lived and worked in Florence and Rome, and run a team from Bali and Phuket. The location-independent life is something I have actually done, not just written about.
The moment it stopped being theory was small and unglamorous. I launched my first real online offer in two days from an apartment in Nha Trang, with no internet the moment I stepped outside. I came home one night to my phone lighting up with sales. That was when it stopped being theory. A screen full of notifications in a rented room, while I had been out with no signal at all. Something I built had worked while I was not watching it. I have been chasing the repeat of that feeling ever since.
Then came the years that made the phrase real instead of aspirational. Bali on repeat because the timezone was kind. Phuket, running my Melbourne team remotely while I was on the other side of a retreat hall. None of it was a holiday. It was work that happened to have a better view.
Living somewhere, not visiting it
Florence was the deep end. I lived five minutes from Dante’s statue in Florence. I read The Divine Comedy because of it. The city quietly rearranges what you think a life is supposed to look like. I studied Italian in Florence and worked the tail of the Melbourne day from a co-working space off Liberta. Living somewhere is a different thing to visiting it.
Living there also taught me not to trust the polish. In Florence I learned that Google reviews and the “authentic” Florence are not the same thing. The lampredotto stall around my corner was never going to show up in a top-ten list, and it was better than anything that would.
Rome I got wrong the first time and right the second. The first time I did Rome I ticked off the big list: the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Forum. It was beautiful and a bit flat. The trip that stuck was the second one, neighbourhood food tours, a game at the Stadio Olimpico, and a slow drive up to Florence with a night in Bagnoregio. That reframe, go back and go deeper rather than wide, is most of what I believe about travel now.
A few of these have stayed with me out of all proportion to how big they were. My clearest Venice memory is a breakfast of cicchetti and a one-euro glass of wine at nine in the morning. It quietly rearranges what you think a morning is for. None of that is a professional travel credential, and I am careful not to dress it up as one. It is lived experience, honestly told. On this site that is the whole currency.
The part I get wrong, on purpose to admit it
I am wary of anyone who only shows you the version that worked, so here is one that did not.
The one place we booked ahead on the whole trip, an ocean-view apartment in Cinque Terre, fell through when we arrived. We ended up walking an abandoned train tunnel to a hidden beach. Over-planning was the only thing that let me down.
I keep that story close because it argues against my own instinct, which is to plan everything. The trips that taught me the most were the ones I could not control. I would rather tell you that than sell you a system that pretends control is the answer. Like missing the overnight train from Barcelona to Paris!
The tension I am still in
I would rather end on the thing I have not solved than pretend I have. The pull I have now is longer than a two-week trip. It is the version Potts writes about, months on the road rather than days. The thing in the way is not money and it is not nerve. It is that a working day tied to Melbourne hours does not travel well.
So Florence was not the finish line. It was the proof of what the finish line has to be: work that genuinely comes with me, instead of work I have to keep phoning home to. That is the actual project. Everything on this site sits somewhere along that line.
I love my city. Melbourne is home. The pull to explore is real anyway, and that is the whole point. Home and the horizon are not a problem to be solved. They are two true things I am trying to hold at once, which is exactly where I came in.
If any of this resonates
Some of my sharpest travel memories are airport goodbyes. You do not really feel the trip until you are hugging someone at a gate, not sure when you will be in the same city again. This site is my version of keeping that feeling nearby on the days I cannot leave.
That is really all Quotes on Travel is: the words that hold the two pulls at once, gathered somewhere I can find them, and now somewhere you can too. If it speaks to you, there is a slow weekly note called 3-2-1-Go!, travel inspiration to take the next step, whatever size that step is this week. Sit with this one, and come along if it feels right.
Trust and transparency
Quotes on Travel is written and run by me, Jean-Luc Giuca. I have got family in the hospitality industry, and about ten years of my own in sales, marketing and digital, but I am not a travel agent or a travel journalist, and I will not pretend to be. What I am is someone who has actually lived and worked the location-independent version of this, and who cares about getting quotes attributed to the right person.
This site also carries advertising, kept as unobtrusive as I can make it. It never changes what I recommend or how a quote gets checked. When I have used something myself, I will say so. When I have not, I will say that too.