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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ddc3336 | Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotations marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of "ibid.'s" and "compare's" and "see's" that are the shield for the pure flow of argument.. | reading | Nicholson Baker | |
| f462380 | The great scholarly or anecdotal footnotes of Lecky, Gibbon, or Boswell, written by the author of the book himself to supplement, or even correct over several later editions, what he says in the primary text, are reassurances that the pursuit of truth doesn't have clear outer boundaries: it doesn't end with the book; restatement and self-disagreement and the enveloping sea of referenced authorities all continue. Footnotes are the finer-suck.. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| 01444a3 | Abelardo, my manager, emerged from a stall. "What do you think, Howie?" he said; it was his standard greeting --one I was fond of. "Abe, I don't know what to think," I said; my standard response." -- | Nicholson Baker | ||
| e50ad7a | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 775dd58 | 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." | Paul Theroux | ||
| 7447d00 | 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 -.. | beauty constellations nature night oceania stars travel | Paul Theroux | |
| 9c6fa63 | 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!" | Paul Theroux | ||
| 9bae818 | On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 4647f7e | 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 851dde7 | 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. | intervention nature transhumanism | Paul Theroux | |
| ac3fe2e | Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial. | Paul Theroux | ||
| ee37d5d | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 6efebbc | 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. | class eighties england poor rich society technology | Paul Theroux | |
| 2444aee | 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! ;-)" | Paul Theroux | ||
| f89e3f2 | 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| e051000 | 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.. | character class english industry work | Paul Theroux | |
| d145d67 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 95834cd | 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 137aaaf | 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? | Paul Theroux | ||
| 6eea3ca | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| b9c239d | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 6c09880 | One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 2eb8ebe | Less frightening, but no less disgusting, is the Iranian taste for jam made out of carrots. | Paul Theroux | ||
| be46803 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 3fbb556 | 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. | self-discovery | Paul Theroux | |
| b06c1ea | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 33afbc1 | All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 62214ab | 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,.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| dea4a13 | Why do things get weaker and worse? Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don't have to --- they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It's despair to accept the senility of obsolescence... | technology | Paul Theroux | |
| aefb7aa | it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map."" | mythomania travelogue | Paul Theroux | |
| 9c4057f | An aimless joy is a pure joy," I said, quoting Yeats." | Paul Theroux | ||
| ccfd9a5 | It is fatal to know too much at the outset. Boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as the novelist who is over certain of his plot." -Paul Theroux" | Timothy Ferriss | ||
| 44829ff | 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, Singhalese 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 7beb50e | Faulkner first spoke about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the hypocrisy of boasting of our values to our enemies "after we have taught them (as we are now doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don't even mean security and justice and even not the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours." He went on to say that if Americans are to survive, we will have to show the wo.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| e5327ae | as Henry James had said in a letter to a do-gooding friend, "Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses--remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own." | Paul Theroux | ||
| a78dfde | Do you know Aggrey Awori?' Mushana said, 'He's an old man.' Awori was my age, regarded as a miracle of longevity in an AIDS stricken country; a Harvard graduate, Class of '63, a track star. Thirty years ago, a rising bureaucrat, friend and confidant of the pugnacious prime minister, Milton Obote, a pompous gap-toothed northerner who had placed his trust in a goofy general named Idi Amin. Awori, powerful then, had been something of a scourge.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 6891f95 | I had some good friends - really funny ones. My best friend was a guy called Apolo Nsibambi. We shared an office at the Extra Mural Department at Makerere, and then I got a promotion - became Acting Director - and I was his boss! I used to tease him for calling himself "Doctor" - he had a Ph. D. in political science. I mocked him for wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase and being pompous. I went to his wedding. He came to my wedding. And .. | Paul Theroux | ||
| f29422b | And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me w.. | south-america travel travel-writing | Paul Theroux | |
| 8925498 | With the motto "do what you will," Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau's Alector, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, Lopez de Ubeda's Justina, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Beroalde de Vervi.. | rabelais | Steven Moore | |
| 916f911 | It had surprised and impressed Tessia to learn that Everran and Avaria owned two wagons, one for their own everyday use and one kept for visits to the Royal Palace. Since the journey to the palace consisted of half the length of two streets, it seemed frivolous to own a vehicle especially for it. | everran tessia the-magicans-apprentice trudi-canavan | Trudi Canavan | |
| 83310da | He watched her drink the soup. "You're getting bored with me, aren't you?" She smiled slyly. "No. I have never found you boring, Mirar. In fact, I've always found you a little too interesting for my own good." He chuckled. So. There it was. The invitation. He had noted the way she sometimes looked at him. Thoughtful. Curious. Admiring. The spark of attraction was still there for her. Was it for him? He thought back to other times circumstan.. | Trudi Canavan | ||
| 412f427 | It's over! | Trudi Canavan | ||
| 484af58 | Most people would not open a door unless they knew what lay beyond, and even if they opened the door by mistake, they would find an uninteresting room beyond. | door ignorance open | Trudi Canavan | |
| c2985c9 | La gente y la tierra son lo mismo - solia decir su padre- si desatiendes una de las dos, la otra acaba pagando las consecuencias | Trudi Canavan |