Quotes from Paul Theroux

bleak and beautiful expanse of lifeless isolation.

He was eager to talk, glad to have a listener, and he didn't need prompting questions.

I decided to hike up to Cerro Potosí, the hill above the town, beyond Tangamanga Park. The guidebook recommended good shoes, water, and long pants against the agave lechuguilla—thorny agave. I started on a cool morning, setting out on the trail

eating together is an occasion that humans have made into a peacemaking ritual;

great white blimp tethered to a cornfield—a surveillance balloon.

Travel had to do with movement and truth, with trying everything, offering yourself to experience and then reporting it.

The earth is becoming intensely citified. "The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography," Robert D. Kaplan writes in The Revenge of Geography.

My idea had been to drive along the border and nip over whenever convenient to the Mexican side. These dozen or so crossings were a revelation to me, putting the whole border debate into perspective, giving it a human face—or rather, many faces.

Lying on a flat, sun-heated rock to get my breath, procrastinating, I soon abandoned my effort to get to the top of Cerro Potosí.

They were in my briefcase, in the trunk, but I was hesitant to get out of the car. I was much taller than the policeman, and he might make my height a cause for provocation

If he doesn't talk to me, and he doesn't walk around with me, and he doesn't travel in the same compartment,' I said, 'I don't understand why he wants to come with me.' 'To make sure you are comfortable. Hospitality. You are our guest ...

If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear and sometimes - importantly - to suffer the effects of this curiosity.

At a certain age you stop being a child and start raising your parents ...

There are three things I never saw her do: tell a lie, be unkind, or arrive on time.

Nothing fully prepares you for the strangeness of the border experience.

Interrupting me, he shouted, "What I am saying is that your plates are illegal. Do you understand? You are breaking the law by driving on our roads." "I have a permit," I said. He had now worked himself into a froth of spitting rage, and as he screamed out of his congested face I saw that he was wrapped in belts, a holstered pistol in one, handcuffs in another, a truncheon, a phone, chrome-plated chains

For many years we had escuelas normales, which were meant to prepare teachers to go to the countryside, to teach in these schools. In the beginning there were thirty or more escuelas normales, but these days there are only thirteen.

I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.

Today, picnicking families, fishermen, and small children idled on the south bank, and waved to the gringo on the Roma bluff.

accurately be termed wasteland

made notes on my progress through the mountains, which had thrilled me.

It is a fairly simple matter to walk to Mexico at any point, but there is always a crush of people—all of them with documents—waiting to enter the US to work, go to school, or shop.

Do you know what I can do to you? Spoken by an enraged policeman in Mexico, that statement seizes your attention, and so does "Puedo hacer lo que quiero"—I can do what I want.

back to my hotel, where it was always mealtime.