Quotes from Paul Theroux

The insecurity in Juárez drifted through the air like the memory of a shattering dream.

I had more questions, but the officer interrupted me with an order. "You can go, sir.

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on a hillside," Joyce writes in Ulysses. "For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother.

a laboratory of social and economic horror.

a powerful account of an idealistic man's campaign to bring change to Africa, at a time when I was a schoolteacher in the African bush.

Australian inland taipan is the most poisonous snake on earth—its bite will kill you in seconds. But none of this ought seriously to deter anyone from confronting the outback on foot, or even on all fours.

from San Luis Potosí, and at Santa María del Río, where the good road ended

I'm a writer, I said. I like long stories.

Fruit pickers here, lab technicians over there.

At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.

One encounter in particular stayed in my memory

The people on the platform stood watching from under large black umbrellas that shone with wetness

just a cement culvert tagged with indignant graffiti, a trickle of sour shallow water rippling through

saw that a lack of money was not the problem in this country—but it seldom is in the hellholes of the world.

Yet the Eastern brown snake—second most toxic in the world—was an unprepossessing reptile.

I stopped simply to look around, in the idle curiosity that is available to any person with a car in Mexico and no particular place to go.

I found my berth and discovered that no one else was going to Xian. The sleeper was empty. This was the rarest situation on a Chinese train, and one to be relished. Such circumstances were almost luxurious and definitely cozy.

The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.

In a landscape of whites and blacks, the most conspicuous person I saw was this man, my first Indian in the South, the owner-manager of a motel, a dot Indian with a caste mark on his forehead rather than a feather Indian. Motels, gas stations, convenience stores: they had a lock on them, and the first one stood for so many I was to find.

Tourists don't know where they've been. Travelers don't know where they're going.

The paradox was more likely that an excess of money was the problem—or one of them; that, and a government run by thieves. But I was just learning, and I thought, as one does in such circumstances: Maybe things will improve farther up the road.

Business is bad, but at least it's quiet here," Ignacio, a shoeshine man, said to me in the plaza at Reynosa, brushing goop on my shoes.

Why is it . . . that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?

as thrilling as a child's game: the hiding, the secrets, the lies, the play-acting, the giggling satisfaction, the guilt, even the furtive sex itself.