Quotes from Paul Theroux

always discount pharmacies on the Mexican side

How many Muslims are there here?' I asked a man in a skullcap. 'Thousands.' 'Have any been to Mecca?' 'One,' he said. 'The government sent him last year.

The Chinese word for yak meant 'hairy cow'. It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.

During the day the Mexican towns are tranquil enough; after dark, not so much.

sweeper with his handcart was a feature of every border town I visited

In fits of romantic masochism, Othón rusticated himself to the arid communities of this region. But he was also a federal judge, and some of these lonely outposts were assigned to him. He made the best of his various places of exile, reporting in agonized poems the physical details of the hard world around him.

fellow paddler—a Malawian, who knew this stretch of the river well—pointed to a reach in the stream ahead, a bank of mud huts partly hidden by tall reeds, and said, "There are bad people in that place"—a place we could not avoid passing.

A tortured note of desperate fatalism runs through his poetry, as in remote landscapes he celebrates the savagery, the howling wilderness.

The teachers," said one bus driver. "It's always the teachers," the other one said. I sighed, grumbled, kicked at roadside gravel, and slapped my head.

It is often the case that only when someone asks you very specific questions do you begin to think clearly about your intentions.

Brownsville was another example of the blurred border, of Mexico brimming against the US and lapping over it, leaving a margin of Mexico on the north bank of the green river.

what made this sense emphatic was that all this time, as the policeman was screaming, local people—slum dwellers, barefoot children, women with bundles—were passing by, glancing at me, and moving on. They knew what was happening

And for all the downtown serenity—the lollygagging, the churchgoing, the taco stands, the mariachi bands, the shoe shiners in the plaza—one is urged by locals to avoid venturing out of town

That's a road. You can take it. Go that way. My bus is too big, but your car can do it.

And there are more than twenty-one thousand Border Patrol agents who work day and night to thwart them.

A young Mexican student in Paris—the unknown and yet to be published Octavio Paz—approached Beckett with a proposal to translate one hundred poems by thirty-five Mexican writers. This would be financed, as a worthy cultural project, with funds from UNESCO.

The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly, with his decades in power, along with his vain, flitting shopaholic wife, his hangers-on, and his goon squad, is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear.

Where are you going, Mr. Paul?' 'For a walk.' Mr. Fang conferred with his Hothot deputy. My walk was given official sanction, and I was driven about a hundred yards to the People's Park and released.

It was Muriel Spark, in her novel Memento Mori: "If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

Thirty pesos," he said—a quick thinker. It was $1.50. I handed it over and the other men laughed at this man's enterprise, or his impudence, or perhaps at my gringo acquiescence.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us

But there is a singular connection between Samuel Beckett, "the grammarian of solitude," sunk in his comical Irish gloom, hiding in a tiny apartment in Paris, and the condition of Manuel Othón, the late-nineteenth-century Mexican recluse, brooding in the parched wasteland in the middle of Mexico. Seemingly at a loss for words around 1900, Othón, in a despairing poem, wrote the Beckett-like line "the desert, the desert and the desert.

I could tell he was worried by what I would ask to do next. I spent the rest of the day trying to elude him and his deputy, and at last, in the market, I succeeded. It was late in the afternoon. We were all (Mr. Fang, his deputy, the driver and I) admiring a stack of vegetables, and when I saw they were transfixed by a shaggy mound of blue cabbages I slipped away.

Lines from William Blake's Jerusalem came to mind: He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.