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86f6b90 The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.. travel risk inspirational Paul Theroux
8ac25fe You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back. Paul Theroux
5ad88c7 I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits. Paul Theroux
2ff99bb Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way Paul Theroux
163bc3f Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life. travel trust life strangers Paul Theroux
f04af26 The measure of civilized behavior is compassion. travel humanity Paul Theroux
c68c000 Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours. reading books reader Paul Theroux
0e33a8b travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts. Paul Theroux
382b1dd luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of travelling with wealthy pe.. wanderlust Paul Theroux
25fc03e The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon. Paul Theroux
f38c8f6 You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back travel gone home Paul Theroux
4576723 a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists. jaywalking asia Paul Theroux
1a2d4d6 All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home. Paul Theroux
e214ed8 You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. Paul Theroux
8096761 Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. travel serendipity travel-writing stories Paul Theroux
7f4d064 I added that it was no fun to grow old, but that the compensation for it was that time turned your mental shit-detector into a highly calibrated instrument. Paul Theroux
1581eac Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel. wanderlust Paul Theroux
4054efa But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, "I've got a wife and kids" is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know - how could he? - that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing comp.. Paul Theroux
b686fc8 The trains [in a country] contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar with i.. Paul Theroux
1053f08 You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. travel traveller Paul Theroux
327da33 There's always a way if you're not in a hurry. travel Paul Theroux
a9735ab I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without having been wounded. Love was power and possession, love caused pain: you were never more exposed than when you were in love, never more wounded; possession was an enslavement, something stifling. love possession power Paul Theroux
e56aad6 I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom. Paul Theroux
0a4840e I have a hatred of the taming of animals, especially large ones that are so contented in the wild. I abominate circus acts that involve big befooled beasts--cowed tigers or helplessly roaring lions pawing the air and teetering on small stools. I deplore zoos and anything to do with animal confinement or restraint. Paul Theroux
6a3d3d0 People will tell you, "What's the use? What's the point of reading novels and poetry?" They'll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized." Paul Theroux
981cf6c The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road. literature topography place Paul Theroux
363f35d But art should require no instrument but memory. Paul Theroux
bab2e33 The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away. Paul Theroux
cfd1408 Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books. Paul Theroux
a6042e4 He was serene, fulfilled, the real thing, the person no one wants to hear about, a happy man. Paul Theroux
1fa22cb As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again." murder Paul Theroux
7575003 Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you." travel perceptions Paul Theroux
68f6e0d Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience. travel writing Paul Theroux
3be7cb3 What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies. Paul Theroux
93791f6 The disorder in Yashar's apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order - the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cozy solidity of a nest. Paul Theroux
baed04d So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which.. travel sight-seeing train-travel Paul Theroux
47b42da There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes. Paul Theroux
48875fc A slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. railways south-america travel-writing Paul Theroux
7602daf I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness. Paul Theroux
7f44e4e Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gascon.. Paul Theroux
f9ebb97 One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company --- they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing... loneliness Paul Theroux
02b3d90 Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease and speed with which a person could be transported from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That .. Paul Theroux
6352ac6 Maputo was much praised as a desirable destination, but it was a dreary, beat-up city of desperate people who had cowered there while war raged in the provinces for twenty-five years, destroying bridges, roads, and railways. Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence; I saw no positive results of charitable efforts. But whenever I expressed.. Paul Theroux
f0da871 One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South." What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia." Paul Theroux
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