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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f049fe0 | But that did not strike me as immoderate. It was a society that was pledged to austerity that was probably the most prone to going on binges. So, philosophically, the name didn't fit. But | Paul Theroux | ||
| 5fbba08 | Little had changed after independence. Jomo Kenyatta's face hung in a framed portrait in every shop where Queen Elizabeth's had been. Some schools were built, some streets renamed. But educated people are a liability in a dictatorship: all the schools were underfunded, few of them succeeded. A great deal of foreign money was given to the government and most of it ended up in the pockets of politicians, some of whom were assassinated. It is .. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 0a30ed8 | A little farther on, he said, "What do you think of India?" "It's a hard question," I said. I wanted to tell him about the children I had seen that morning pathetically raiding the leftovers of my breakfast, and ask him if he thought there was any truth in Mark Twain's comment on Indians: "It is a curious people. With them, all life seems to be sacred except human life." But I added instead, "I haven't been here very long." | Paul Theroux | ||
| 4ab4265 | The Chinese word for yak meant 'hairy cow'. It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera. | Paul Theroux | ||
| ac331dc | The British were fatalistic; it was the origin of their cynicism, but it also made them good sharers of misfortune. 'Oh, well, mustn't grumble! | Paul Theroux | ||
| 7877e89 | Africa had been deliverance for me, a liberating embrace and an opportunity. | Paul Theroux | ||
| f0a26e6 | How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there | Paul Theroux | ||
| 7e53b75 | 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 | ||
| 7c0c913 | Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. | science technology wonder | Paul Theroux | |
| b4048e2 | Telling the truth and being ethical often keeps people from political power, but doing the right thing, always, without exception, is all that matters in the long run, and is ultimately powerful. That's why the true heroes of the civil rights struggle were never politicians. They were humble folk on a mission, enduring sit-ins and organizing marches and debates. When they began to succeed, the politicians, seeing an opportunity, followed th.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| d7d6e76 | Mormonism was like junk food: It was American to the core and it looked all right, but it wasn't until after you had swallowed some that you felt strange. I | Paul Theroux | ||
| 897750d | Believe me, England's prisons are full of splendid people. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 8c94979 | Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 6ef9a41 | What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry." --PAUL THEROUX, QUOTING TONY THE BEACHCOMBER, IN THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA In this way, vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal--not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way." | Rolf Potts | ||
| d31d579 | Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but .. | namibia tourism tourist travel | Paul Theroux | |
| 8c64890 | Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned--volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So--writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life, | Paul Theroux | ||
| db9371b | Sometimes I miss Boston', I said. It was a timid confession. I missed it every day - its space, its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was like the feel of flesh. Reality for me was the past, and it was elsewhere. This - London - was like a role I had been assigned to play, and I was still yet unsure of my lines. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 4b7bd3c | Malmesbury, was an example, a market town in an old farming district, surrounded by wheat fields, on Hansie's route to Springbok. This town, too, had grown. | Paul Theroux | ||
| b8b82b6 | These chicken feet are first quality. You appreciate them? | Paul Theroux | ||
| bcf6c35 | All the crockery in China had been smashed - flung over the years in all the periodic convulsions for which China was famous. All the blood-stained carpets had been tossed away. All the ancestors' portraits had been destroyed. All the bodies had been buried. It was a country of bare rooms and empty shelves, like this apartment | hongkong | Paul Theroux | |
| aeccf6a | Most people come to Africa to see large or outlandish animals in the wild, while some others -- "the new gang -- the gang of virtue" -- make the visit to tell Africans how to improve their lives. And many people do both -- animal watching in the early morning, busybodying in the afternoon." | Paul Theroux | ||
| 77ccc55 | The sight of bribery on the back road of any country is a clear indication that the whole place is corrupt and the regime a thieving tyranny, | Paul Theroux | ||
| b5280f2 | The idea for elephant-back safaris was initially that of the photographer, socialite, and Africa hand Peter Beard, who suggested to Moore in the 1980s that riding elephants through the bush was unprecedented and would be an incomparable safari. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 78cdc8f | We have bestowed on Africa just enough of the disposable junk of the modern world to create in African cities a junkyard replica of the West, | Paul Theroux | ||
| c2d3002 | The intrusion of outsiders in the day-to-day lives of Africans was the sort of thing I had always criticized. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 5e9cee8 | Colonialism oppressed and subverted Africans and remade them as scavengers, pleaders, and servants | Paul Theroux | ||
| 4c7b723 | Travel has always been my way of defeating this sinking feeling, partly because travel is a form of escape, and travel itself--the elemental farewell--becomes the fugitive fantasy of a new life, travel inspiring a sense of hope. I | Paul Theroux | ||
| 06d8a1b | 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 | Paul Theroux | ||
| 114b88e | A train journey is travel; everything else--planes especially--is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands.--GRB | Paul Theroux | ||
| 105710d | 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 | Paul Theroux | ||
| a90587f | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| f614f2b | 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| c0c3800 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 8bff9f4 | 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| c9ffd07 | KIAJIAN | Paul Theroux | ||
| 80c6d22 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| a8cb75a | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 3968a1d | 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. | knowitalls | Paul Theroux | |
| c936796 | 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 .. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 38826b0 | book of Revelation, | Paul Theroux | ||
| 34b9fd8 | eating together is an occasion that humans have made into a peacemaking ritual; | Paul Theroux | ||
| b74b8f8 | Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers. | megalomaniac novelist traveler | Paul Theroux | |
| fe708bf | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 1749c82 | 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. | Paul Theroux |