To Travel Is To Live

From The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography (1855). The full poetic expression reads: "To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, / To gain all while you give, / To roam the roads of lands remote, / To travel is to live." Andersen spent a combined fifteen years of his life traveling abroad — embarking on some thirty extended journeys — and wrote vivid travelogues alongside his fairy tales, making travel central to both his life and his literary identity.