Quotes from Paul Theroux

creating paradoxes that are clearly apparent on the border.

Raging politeness," this extreme friendliness is sometimes termed, but even if that is true, it is better than the cold stare or the averted eyes or the calculated snub I was used to in New England.

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

I mentioned that I had just come from a tour in Boys' Town. "That's very risky," Jaime Arispe said. "You have no rights there, because it's a Zona de Tolerancia. They have their own police.

filled with Frida's startling paintings and also many of Diego's, family photographs and paraphernalia, such as the corsets and leg braces that the wounded (thirty operations, including an amputated leg) Frida had worn.

a world of broken promises, a land to flee.

I had done enough traveling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance

Instead of accepting that, I am writing this. I realize that what motivates most other writers in the world is the desire to have control over their obituary.

another wildly gesturing to her comatose baby and pleading for help

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.

Jaime had been born in Ciudad Acuña in 1953. His father, a civilian worker at Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, started his shift early, and at noon crossed to Acuña for lunch and a siesta, then crossed back to the base until it was time to clock out.

this land has relied on masquerade for millennia

Montaigne discussed the hypocrisy of seeing strangers as savage: "every man calls barbarous the thing he is not accustomed to.

But I was not looking for repose or tranquility. This weekend was an aberration. It is pleasant in Mexico to sit by the beach, inert and sunlit, sipping a mojito, but who wants to hear about that? What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm.

Now a museum, it was filled with Frida's startling paintings and also many of Diego's, family photographs and paraphernalia, such as the corsets and leg braces that the wounded (thirty operations, including an amputated leg) Frida had worn. Out of the small, stifling rooms, the courtyard was a suburban jungle of tamed vines and trimmed trees, the whole house a work of art, a kind of habitable sculpture.

The recluse, the shunner of fame, the "I just want to be alone" escapee—B. Traven was one, so was J. D. Salinger—seems perversely to invite intrusion.

To regulate the flow of fieldworkers, the Bracero Program (Mexicans working on short-term contracts) was established in 1942 under an agreement between the US and Mexico.

If they make it, they can blend in.

to rid the people of their old beliefs and insert new ones.

There are sixty-three species of bats in Mexico, ranging from the three-inch-long bug-eating free-tailed bat to the carnivorous spectral bat, with a three-foot wingspan, which feeds on reptiles, small mammals, and other bats.

after the town of Tehuacán into the heights of the rocky past, not a person in sight, the summits of these nameless mountains looking scalded and bare and terrifying in their flinty emptiness.

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.

spent the rest of the morning in the gardens on my own, loving the solitude

There is a great fear of natural things in Australia. But no one mentions the drunks, who are everywhere and are a great deal more dangerous.