Quotes from Paul Theroux

keeps Mexico ticking over

This is getting depressing," Julieta said. "Let's go to the Casa Azul." The Blue House, in Coyoacán, a short walk from the restaurant, was where Frida Kahlo had been born, grew up, and lived with Diego Rivera.

glittering mortuary masks, items harvested from ruins and tombs all over Mexico.

What I had learned on the border from the mothers intending to cross was not that they wished to make a new life in the States, but that they hoped, as a solution, to make enough money to keep their family together in Mexico.

land of fortified dwellings.

instead of tearing down the building, solidly made with a four-acre footprint, it was turned into a center for the arts—gallery upon gallery, with coffee shops and restaurants. Here and there iron clumps of machinery have been left on pedestals, looking like vorticist sculptures.

improvisational infrastructure.

HCl is the formula for hydrochloric acid," the label began, and explained that this acid is an aid to human digestion. Then the unexpected detail: the see-through pipes were filled with human vomit, "donated by anonymous patients from a bulimic clinic." You admire the artistry and form, and then, told what it represented, you gaze with nauseated horror.

was questioning one of the cardinal precepts of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.

the sacrifice of health and well-being to corporate-denominated images of bodily appearance.

But hope and determination and a willingness to take risks are not enough to overcome the curse of bad government or the hostility of the everyday, the warding off of evil.

I attended one of the many Mexican weddings that weekend, as an uninvited, eavesdropping celebrant.

What most Australians seem to want in the way of a response is something funny and familiar, such as You bloody diggers are rough as pig's breakfast, but that's what I like.

It is fatal to know too much at the outset. Boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

In a routine that served me for the next few weeks, I wandered around the busy, seemingly safe part of the city.

This corruption has become systemic, a way of doing business. Cops make money by shaking down anyone they can.

seem to have a very wide spectrum of readers in this country," I said.

I walked for an hour and then returned by a different route to wait out the weekend. It was one of those empty interludes in travel, an airless unrewarding delay, when nothing occurs except a rising sense of loneliness and uncertainty, a darkening of prospects, the condition of being an outsider with all of a stranger's suspicions.

I said I was a stranger here. "Ain't no strangers here, baby," she said, and gave me a merry smile.

That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome.

No one ever came here; people just went away from it and never returned.

Related to fertility, the bat was known in Zapotec as bigidiri zinnia—flesh butterfly (mariposa de carne)—and was a benign god.

Dropping me back at San Dario Avenue, which was the road to the international bridge, he said, "You should leave." "Thanks." But it was not easy. The entire walkway on the bridge was filled with people, all of them Mexican, obviously with visas or papers, headed toward the door with the sign US IMMIGRATION—not shuffling toward the door, not moving, but just waiting

The consequence is that Mexico pays "a disproportionate share of the cost of the American gun and drug habits