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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 85c9b48 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| bb73968 | which proved yet again, as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 1295b80 | 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 . . . | Paul Theroux | ||
| 0fc0edf | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 6c3a0f6 | 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 9aa98a5 | 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." | Paul Theroux | ||
| 7e2b654 | 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." | Paul Theroux | ||
| c275608 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 13be54c | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 8e6bd17 | Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I. | Paul Theroux | ||
| c2969be | His education was sketchy, yet he was immensely learned in the oblique and selective way of someone self-taught. | Paul Theroux | ||
| dae879d | 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." | Paul Theroux | ||
| a9f93bf | she looked a hundred years older, as stale and ruined as yesterday's oatmeal. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 79e200a | 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'.. | cruel-world | Paul Theroux | |
| da4fab3 | At my | Paul Theroux | ||
| 1424ac7 | Montaigne discussed the hypocrisy of seeing strangers as savage: "every man calls barbarous the thing he is not accustomed to." | Paul Theroux | ||
| e624e4a | At a certain age you stop being a child and start raising your parents ... | Paul Theroux | ||
| 9a10374 | I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy. | Paul Theroux | ||
| b35c6e6 | triphthong. | Paul Theroux | ||
| b36f7c8 | A poem is a living organism. | Ataol Behramoğlu | ||
| 50532af | Creativity is a hidden gem. Education is needed to uncover it. | Ataol Behramoğlu | ||
| 1393c64 | The Earth is the Mother, I am her Son. | Atharva Veda | ||
| 3ea207c | 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 .. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 7cd97d8 | 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| e47a9c6 | And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 79b3186 | Even the smoke of our motherland is sweet and pleasant to us.")" | Paul Theroux | ||
| 30a6887 | 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 .. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 3334a43 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 299dadc | Truth is not a saga of alarming episodes; it is a detail, usually a small one, that gives a fiction life. | Paul Theroux | ||
| ce795a4 | 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 0eba18f | 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 .. | geography humor travel | Paul Theroux | |
| 8e7fb52 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| e7ef993 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 6485a19 | 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. | Paul Theroux | ||
| bdf5c93 | 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.. | Paul Theroux | ||
| ba724c0 | I did not share their joy or feel very kindly toward any of them, | Paul Theroux | ||
| 6b3dbc5 | All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze. | Paul Theroux | ||
| d54dec4 | And this is a small point by comparison, but why do Republicans persist in substituting "Democrat," with its "rat" ending, when "Democratic" would be correct? Because they want us to know, in every word they speak, how much they hold us in contempt. In my lifetime, the Republicans have never accepted a Democratic president as legitimate, no matter how many people vote for him [or her.])" | Karen Joy Fowler | ||
| 370932f |
Luego me di cuenta de que no se trataba de la ciudad, sino del viaje: a veces uno se siente solo si viaja solo. Paul Theroux, uno de los grandes escritores en el camino, escribio El Tao esencial del viajero compuesto por diez premisas. La primera, obviamente, es: < |
Javier Sinay | ||
| c0f02f8 | After having been recited, the Veda is put back in a chest. | Atharva Veda | ||
| 3dce6a3 | The first impulse of morality is to oppose positive legality and conventional justice. | Athenaeum Fragments | ||
| 9ded5fb | Tyvara shook her head. "I knew this would happen. I didn't want to become attached to you because I knew, if I did, something would take you away." Suddenly he couldn't stop smiling. She looked up and frowned. "What's so funny?" "I love you, too," he said." | Trudi Canavan | ||
| dc2518b | It is often wiser not to fight at all than attack before victory is sure', | Trudi Canavan | ||
| 5e32c40 | Communication, for | Trudi Canavan |