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06d8a1b
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A river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.--OPE
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Paul Theroux |
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114b88e
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A train journey is travel; everything else--planes especially--is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands.--GRB
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Paul Theroux |
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105710d
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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; sightseeing
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Paul Theroux |
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a90587f
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just a short trip to any French territory in the Pacific is enough to convince even the most casual observer that the French are among the most self-serving, manipulative, trivial-minded, obnoxious, cynical, and corrupting nations on the face of the earth.
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Paul Theroux |
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f614f2b
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It takes a certain specialist's dedication to travel in squalid cities and fetid slums, among the utterly dependant poor, who have lost nearly all of their traditions, and most of their habitat. You need first of all the skill and the temperament of a proctologist. Such a person, deft in rectal exams, is as essential to medicine as any other specialist, yet it is only the resolute few who opt to examine the condition of the human body by st..
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Paul Theroux |
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c0c3800
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The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it's a joke, because of course it is never a joke.
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Paul Theroux |
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8bff9f4
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A sense of hopelessness had weighed me down like a fever since I'd stepped across the border weeks before. And with this fever came a vision that had sharpened, coming into greater focus, as if inviting me to look closer. My first reaction was a laugh of disgust at the ugliness around me, like the reek of a latrine that makes you howl or at the sight of a dirty bucket of chicken pieces covered with flies. After the moment of helpless hilari..
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Paul Theroux |
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c9ffd07
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KIAJIAN
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Paul Theroux |
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80c6d22
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The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear.
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Paul Theroux |
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a8cb75a
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most of the portraits of Niyazov all over Turkmenistan showed him smiling, though he never looked less reliable, or less amused, than when he was smiling. His smile - and this may be true of all political leaders - was his most sinister feature.
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Paul Theroux |
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3968a1d
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He used the word savages with affection, as if he liked them a little for it. In his nature was a respect for wildness. He saw it as a personal challenge, something that could be put right with an idea or a machine. He felt he had the answer to most problems, if anyone cared to listen.
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knowitalls
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Paul Theroux |
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c936796
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In the midst of this scoured landscape, on a suburban street, I saw the church steeple, and Lucille slowed down and pointed, and waved me on. As I passed her to enter the parking lot, I thanked her, and she gave me a wonderful smile, and just before she drove on she said, "Be blessed." That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so ..
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Paul Theroux |
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38826b0
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book of Revelation,
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Paul Theroux |
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34b9fd8
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eating together is an occasion that humans have made into a peacemaking ritual;
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Paul Theroux |
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b74b8f8
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Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.
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megalomaniac
traveler
novelist
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Paul Theroux |
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fe708bf
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The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.
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Paul Theroux |
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1749c82
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In a landscape of whites and blacks, the most conspicuous person I saw was this man, my first Indian in the South, the owner-manager of a motel, a dot Indian with a caste mark on his forehead rather than a feather Indian. Motels, gas stations, convenience stores: they had a lock on them, and the first one stood for so many I was to find.
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Paul Theroux |
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85c9b48
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The past wasn't dead, nor past. She herself was black, and was explaining the demographic of the Black Belt today by referring to slavery, still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.
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Paul Theroux |
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bb73968
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which proved yet again, as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind.
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Paul Theroux |
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1295b80
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No light; but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell; hope never comes That comes to all; but torture without end . . .
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Paul Theroux |
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0fc0edf
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The trains in any 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.
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Paul Theroux |
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6c3a0f6
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went by back roads, past pines, swamps, shacks, the small towns of Lorman and Fayette, a school flying a Confederate flag, and down one road on which for some miles there were large lettered signs with intimidating Bible quotations nailed to roadside trees: "Prepare to Meet Thy God--Amos 4:12" and "He who endures to the end shall be saved--Mark 13:13" and "REPENT"--Mark 6:12." Finally I arrived at the lovely town of Natchez. Natchez is dram..
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Paul Theroux |
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9aa98a5
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I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things," Thoreau wrote in his essay "Life Without Principle," "so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality."
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Paul Theroux |
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7e2b654
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We walk through ourselves," Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, summing up the travel experience, "meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves."
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Paul Theroux |
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c275608
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In Cairo, there was a thin line between pestering and hospitality - indeed, they often amounted to the same thing, and although there were plenty of beggars there was little thievery.
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Paul Theroux |
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13be54c
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Whenever an art form--music, book, drama, song--is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art--even the obscene, semiliterate yawp and grunt of rap--drains the life from it.
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Paul Theroux |
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8e6bd17
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Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I.
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Paul Theroux |
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c2969be
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His education was sketchy, yet he was immensely learned in the oblique and selective way of someone self-taught.
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Paul Theroux |
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dae879d
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In one case, at a meeting at Alpha Gamma Delta, "active sorority members . . . began standing up to voice support for the [black] recruit and challenge alumnae decisions." "The entire house wanted this girl to be in Alpha Gam," one of the sisters at Alpha Gamma Delta said."
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Paul Theroux |
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a9f93bf
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she looked a hundred years older, as stale and ruined as yesterday's oatmeal.
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Paul Theroux |
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79e200a
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The world is plain rotten. People are mean, they're cruel, they're fake, they always pretend to be something their not. They're weak. They take advantage. A cruddy little man who sees God in a snake, or the devil in thunder, will take you prisoner if he gets the drop on you. Give anyone half a chance and he'll make you a slave; he'll tell you the most awful lies. I've seen them, running around bollocky, playing God. And our friends... they'..
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cruel-world
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Paul Theroux |
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da4fab3
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At my
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Paul Theroux |
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1424ac7
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Montaigne discussed the hypocrisy of seeing strangers as savage: "every man calls barbarous the thing he is not accustomed to."
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Paul Theroux |
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e624e4a
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At a certain age you stop being a child and start raising your parents ...
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Paul Theroux |
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9a10374
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I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.
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Paul Theroux |
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b35c6e6
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triphthong.
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Paul Theroux |
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3ea207c
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No, I wasn't. One of the things shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book . Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he ..
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Paul Theroux |
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7cd97d8
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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, maintaining the delusion that it is travel. This is the equivalent of being measured like a projectile and being shot out of a cannon, and that's how most of us feel in such a state, like a human cannonball, dazed and confused, in the company of other cannonba..
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Paul Theroux |
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e47a9c6
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And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.
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Paul Theroux |
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79b3186
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Even the smoke of our motherland is sweet and pleasant to us.")"
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Paul Theroux |
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30a6887
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I argued myself into thinking that physical experience is the only true reality. I didn't want to be told about this, nor did I wish to read about this at second hand. I didn't want to look at pictures or study about it on a small computer screen. I didn't want to be lectured about it. I wanted to be traveling in the middle of it, and for it to be washing over me, as it was today, in the emphatic weather, very hot, the glistening shades of ..
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Paul Theroux |
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3334a43
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And why was I still here? I felt I was killing time, especially in Russia, which, in spite of all the talk of change and reform, seemed exactly the same place as it had ever been: a pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police.
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Paul Theroux |
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299dadc
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Truth is not a saga of alarming episodes; it is a detail, usually a small one, that gives a fiction life.
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Paul Theroux |
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ce795a4
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I turned to the flyleaf and wrote: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty. No privacy, no relief. Constant stopping and starting, broken engine, howling passengers. On days like this I wonder why I bother: leaving order and friends for disorder and strangers. I'm homesick and feel punished for my selfishness in leaving. Precisely what Crusoe says on his island. Impossible to get comfortable in this seat. A jail atmosphere: the brown wall..
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Paul Theroux |