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England resembles a ship in its shape' wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Traits. He was wrong... England, of course, resembles a pig, with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; its snout is the south-west in Wales, and its reaching trotters are Cornwall, and its rump is East Anglia. The whole of Britain looks like a witch riding on a pig, and these contours - rump and snout and bonnet, and the scowling face of Western ..
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travel
humor
geography
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Paul Theroux |
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Like most Hong Kongers I had met, they were complete provincials, with laughable pretensions. Was it the effect of colonialism? They were well fed and rather silly and politically naive. In some ways Hong Kong was somewhat like Britain itself: a bunch of offshore islands with an immigrant problem, a language barrier and a rigid class system.
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Paul Theroux |
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Yet because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what's the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between.
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Paul Theroux |
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6485a19
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There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather, a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past.
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Paul Theroux |
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bdf5c93
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thought of Almeida Garrett, the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese traveler and philosopher. An inspiration to me, Garrett had taken a trip in his own country, chronicled in Travels in My Homeland (Viagens na Minha Terra), and seeing the poverty, he had formulated a question: "I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralization, degr..
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Paul Theroux |
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ba724c0
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I did not share their joy or feel very kindly toward any of them,
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Paul Theroux |
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6b3dbc5
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All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.
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Paul Theroux |
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2926ac7
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The trouble with cameras is that people see them a mile away.
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Paul Theroux |
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e6c82bf
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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Paul Theroux |
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f110cfb
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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Paul Theroux |
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838ba1d
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Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.
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Paul Theroux |
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a20f8b0
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I sought trains; I found passengers.
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Paul Theroux |
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67deeba
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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Paul Theroux |
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e262d88
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Photographers are failed painters.
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Paul Theroux |
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99db4ee
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Even the most distant and exotic place has its parallel in ordinary life.
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Paul Theroux |