Quotes from Paul Theroux

Sometimes I miss Boston', I said. It was a timid confession. I missed it every day - its space, its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was like the feel of flesh. Reality for me was the past, and it was elsewhere. This - London - was like a role I had been assigned to play, and I was still yet unsure of my lines.

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient

Frida is a detour and a distraction. It was her genius as an artist, and her neurotic narcissism, to turn her whole self into art—her love, her suffering, her accident-prone life—and in the process make herself an icon, for the Mexican tradition is full of icons, especially of madonnas.

Sometimes a whispered word, or a single image or glimpse of humanity, can be a powerful motivation for looking deeper into the world.

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient, and we weren't under any pressure to join.

One child was provoked to a stumbling dance at the feet of the fiddler, who was sawing his heart out with his eyes shut.

Reasoning that I would rather take a detour for hours on a bad road than sit in my car in a traffic jam, I thanked him and drove away, past the parked cars and the children and the protesting teachers, through the bowl of a green valley and into the hills that looked rockier and drier in the distance.

was ashamed of Father, who didn't care what anyone thought. And I envied him for being so free, and hated myself for feeling ashamed.

Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.

poster of Santa Muerte, Holy Death, a skeleton in a hooded cloak, with a grinning skull, her bony hand wrapped around the shaft of a scythe.

the journey is the goal.

The train was sunlit and emptier.

covert rituals.

walked through a small park and up the steps of the stern gray building of US Customs and Border Protection. I strolled down the ramp and pushed through a turnstile, no one looking at my passport. Glancing through the chain-link fence on the Mexican side of the building, I saw a line of people—a long line, stretching down the stairs and through a foyer and along a passageway, hundreds, perhaps a thousand people waiting to enter the United States.

Gringo, she could have made you happy!" "I would have made my wife very unhappy.

My idea was that I would have lunch in Mexicali and hurry back to Calexico, but this line of people was daunting, moving so slowly that I decided to skip lunch and just look.

On November 2, 1492, in Cuba, Christopher Columbus saw an Arawak man puffing on rolled tobacco leaves, a European's first glimpse of smoking.

The justification for the United States government's barbaric and inhumane violence to the families was a biblical injunction to submit, preached by the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, smiling over his notes: "Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to [sic] the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.

It was soon clear as we ground through traffic that though Calexico, California, was a small town, Mexicali, on the other side of the thirty-foot fence, was a city of a million people, with an international airport, a large cathedral, a bullring, two museums, hospitals, four universities, a dental school, several public libraries, and industrial areas, sprawling in the desert of Baja

the wasteland flanked by magnificent mountains of sharp, shining granite peaks, some like shattered knives and others like fractured black bones, or marked with odd, inky splashes of obsidian.

I was traveling south in sunshine, euphoric again, on the open road.

His Congo Diary is a powerful account of an idealistic man's campaign to bring change to Africa

every trip is unique.

Pimsa," Héctor said, passing the industrial park. "What's that?