Quotes from Paul Theroux

Africa had been deliverance for me, a liberating embrace and an opportunity.

It is my suspicion that people who are glamoured by big cities and think of themselves as urbane and thoroughly metropolitan are at heart country mice—simple, fearful, overdomesticated provincials, dazzled by city lights.

and then gouts of them, a straggling mass of buttery beating wings, and after a while clouds of butterflies so thick they blinded me briefly and smeared my windows and left powdery streaks of scales on the hood of my car when I smacked into them.

How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there

I read about elsewheres, fantasizing about my freedom.

an intruder wearing a Mexican alibi.

And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.

At first I resisted, feeling like a fool

Most people come to Africa to see large or outlandish animals in the wild, while some others — "the new gang — the gang of virtue" — make the visit to tell Africans how to improve their lives. And many people do both — animal watching in the early morning, busybodying in the afternoon.

he was turning sixty-two, not an age of life-altering shocks but only of subtle diminishments.

D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, and Aldous Huxley—all visitors, inspired in their writing by their immersion in Oaxaca—would recognize

What I saw, what I experienced, the freedom of the trip, the people I met, the things I learned: my days were filled with road candy.

The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace

The sight of bribery on the back road of any country is a clear indication that the whole place is corrupt and the regime a thieving tyranny

Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home.

I have a hatred of the taming of animals, especially large ones that are so contented in the wild. I abominate circus acts that involve big befooled beasts — cowed tigers or helplessly roaring lions pawing the air and teetering on small stools. I deplore zoos and anything to do with animal confinement or restraint.

This protest, the rebellion, was a tonic.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in

Finally, this being America," Bryson says at another point, "there is the constant possibility of murder." The bears leave him alone, he is not murdered, and apart from sore feet, he is hardly inconvenienced in what is, for all its mock ordeals, a likable book.

the freedom of pandemonium

calendar scenes that you admire for a moment before feeling an urge to move on to a new month.

His book accurately reflects what I feel in traveling in America—the solitary road trip that is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on earth.

the mood is festive with a subtext of anarchy.

A day or so later, the formal celebrations ended, less raucously, with ritual all-nighters at grave sites in rural villages outside Oaxaca bidding the dead farewell.