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c90300b
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The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.
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writing
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Paul Theroux |
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0926bfc
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And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don't bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.
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Paul Theroux |
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8a111bf
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and I began to think that the strictures of Islam would quickly make me a fancier of the margins of anatomy, thrilling at especially trim ankles, seeking a wink behind a veil, or watching for a response in the shoulders of one of those shrouded forms.
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Paul Theroux |
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cf13ba3
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The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone 'on safari' is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.
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Paul Theroux |
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ad5381e
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Borges, who said, "Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve."
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Paul Theroux |
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76ce795
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Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people's.
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Paul Theroux |
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561c5ca
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Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy.
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Paul Theroux |
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479b359
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Death rephrases the life of everyone who's near.
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Paul Theroux |
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32e1109
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sightseeing, an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity, flattering oneself with the notion that one is discovering the past when really one is inventing it, using a guidebook as a scenario of swift notations.
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Paul Theroux |
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1d87e95
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Drunk people, loud people, obvious and angry people, people stammering and stumbling, spilling drinks and scarfing small burned sausages and cheese cubes on toothpicks. They had surrendered all power and direction, they they were yelling and gasping. They strengthened me. I did not want to be that way. I stood calmer, observing them.
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Paul Theroux |
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2b97a8f
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We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.
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Paul Theroux |
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30d8df8
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In elk land tonen de treinen de essentiele kenmerken van de cultuur: Thaise treinen hebben de badkruik met de geglazuurde draak op de zijkant, de Ceylonese een wagen die gereserveerd is voor boeddhistische monniken, de Indiase een vegetarische keuken en zes klassen. De Iraanse hun bidmatjes, de Maleisische een noedelstalletje, de Vietnamese kogelvrij glas op de locomotief en in elk rijtuig van de Russische Spoorwegen staat een samovar. De s..
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reizen
treinen
treinreizen
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Paul Theroux |
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cdd5797
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Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.
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gratitude
travel
concentration
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Paul Theroux |
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f4e8bf7
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The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.
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Paul Theroux |
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c4d4e64
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A reader meeting another reader is an encounter of kindred spirits. The pleasure of such a joyous event is impossible to describe to a nonreader, and why would I bother? But you, with this book in your hand, are familiar with the phenomenon, and so it is not necessary.
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Paul Theroux |
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58254b7
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That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.
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Paul Theroux |
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985b2ab
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I guessed it was a migratory bird, too innocent to be wary of the spiders in the jungle grass. It worried be to think that we were a little like that bird
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Paul Theroux |
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1d5ea78
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The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic,
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Paul Theroux |
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cae43ee
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One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy-- at the time, not afterwards. Most people don't realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.
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time
self-knowledge
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Paul Theroux |
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e50ad7a
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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. This risky suspension of disbelief is often an experience freighted with anxiety. But what's the alternative? Usually there is none.
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Paul Theroux |
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775dd58
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You travel all over," the woman said. "Do you write about your travels?" I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. "You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books," she said. I said, Exactly, and told her why."
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Paul Theroux |
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7447d00
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Even in Africa, I had never seen such a profusion of stars as I saw on these clear nights on Pacific isles - not only big beaming planets and small single pinpricks... but also glittering clouds of them - the whole dome of the sky crowded with thick shapes formed from stars, overlaid with more shapes, a brilliant density, like a storm of light over a black depthless sea, made brighter still by twisting auroras composed of tiny star grains -..
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stars
travel
nature
beauty
constellations
oceania
night
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Paul Theroux |
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9c6fa63
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And father said "I never wanted this. I'm sick of everyone pretending to be old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his Japanese bucksaw -- all these fake frontiersmen with their chuck wagons full of Twinkies and Wonderbread and aerosol cheese spread. Get out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel, Dan, and let's talk self-sufficiency!"
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Paul Theroux |
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9bae818
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On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale.
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Paul Theroux |
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4647f7e
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But so little has changed. This is practically the same country I left thirty-five years ago. Maybe worse. The government doesn't even care enough to help you.' This was too broad a subject. She said with what seemed like hesitation but something that was actually a statement of fortitude, 'It's - just - light a little candle.' We passed grass huts, smallholdings of tobacco, some of them being harvested, soggy fields. Not much traffic, thou..
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Paul Theroux |
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851dde7
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Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. You're protected on your hands and knees. It's either that or wings.
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nature
transhumanism
intervention
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Paul Theroux |
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ac3fe2e
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Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial.
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Paul Theroux |
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ee37d5d
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Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of writing - groping around in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness.
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Paul Theroux |
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6efebbc
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I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity.
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eighties
class
rich
poor
society
england
technology
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Paul Theroux |
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2444aee
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A British traveler remarked, 'There are [fashions in Guatemala] which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect...'" FILL IN YOUR OWN GRIPES! ;-)"
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Paul Theroux |
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f89e3f2
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Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you're reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to endure the unrewarding nuisance and delay of the road. But reading can also be a powerful stimulus to travel. That was the case for me from the beginning. Reading and restlessness-dissatisfaction at home, a sourness of being indoors, and a notion..
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Paul Theroux |
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e051000
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The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made..
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character
work
industry
class
english
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Paul Theroux |
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d145d67
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No one was interested in Malabo - this was why the people in the village must have suspected him of having a deeper motive for visiting. He wanted something from them - why else would he come all this way to live in a hut? Altruism was unknown. Forty years of aid and charities and NGOs had taught them that. Only self-interested outsiders trifled with Africa, so Africa punished them for it.
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Paul Theroux |
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95834cd
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That seemed to be a feature of life in the country [Malawi]: to welcome strangers, to let them live out their fantasy of philanthropy - a school, an orphanage, a clinic, a welfare center, a malaria eradication program, or a church; and then determine if in any of this effort and expense there was a side benefit - a kickback, a bribe, an easy job, a free vehicle. If the scheme didn't work - and few of them did work - whose fault was that? Wh..
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Paul Theroux |
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137aaaf
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Before I left the house I put my head into the boys' bedroom. The room was cool but the children seemed to radiate warmth - their glow was in the air - and this warmth from such a small bed I associated with their good hearts. They still smelled soapily of their baths, and I kissed their warm cheeks and whispered good night. What is it in darkness that makes us whisper?
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Paul Theroux |
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6eea3ca
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A viagem e muito mais recompensadora quando deixa de ter que ver com a nossa chegada a um destino e se torna indistinguivel de vivermos a nossa vida.
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Paul Theroux |
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b9c239d
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The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state's contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace's, Martin Luther King's, and Bear Bryant's.
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Paul Theroux |
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6c09880
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One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City.
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Paul Theroux |
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2eb8ebe
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Less frightening, but no less disgusting, is the Iranian taste for jam made out of carrots.
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Paul Theroux |
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be46803
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Mimicry reassures the weak, and the envious fool takes the risk as often as the visionary who mocks the error and leave the man alone.
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Paul Theroux |
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3fbb556
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I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.
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self-discovery
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Paul Theroux |
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b06c1ea
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January snow lay thick on the ground--crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning.
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Paul Theroux |
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33afbc1
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All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.
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Paul Theroux |
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62214ab
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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 is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur,..
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Paul Theroux |