Quotes from Paul Theroux

But I wondered about the noise and roistering: what had this cacophony and masquerade to do with the Day of the Dead?

Our great gift as a country is its size and its relative emptiness, its elbow room. That space allows for difference and is often mistaken for tolerance. The person who dares to violate that space is the real traveler.

The idea for elephant-back safaris was initially that of the photographer, socialite, and Africa hand Peter Beard, who suggested to Moore in the 1980s that riding elephants through the bush was unprecedented and would be an incomparable safari.

An airport is an obstacle course, and because of that it can sour you on the whole notion of travel. By degrees, over the years, the airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control. Such is the clumsy questioning of motives

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

But the modern masquerade—precisely because the participants were masked—guaranteed anonymity

I hate being read to. I hate the pauses. I hate the stammers and mispronunciations. Most of all I hate the slowness of it. I can read quickly and efficiently, and cannot stand someone taking charge and denying me the pleasure of reading the damned thing myself.

Why not?" "Because I'm not a broken branch. Dead things go downstream. That's a funeral procession on that creek. If we surrender to the current, we're doomed." He pointed his finger stump in the direction of the coast. "Everything tends that way. But we've got to fight it, because down there is death.

We have bestowed on Africa just enough of the disposable junk of the modern world to create in African cities a junkyard replica of the West

Valerie's and Diego's helpful candor and their ability to tell a story set the tone of the workshop. I blessed my luck that I would have a week or more with such wonderful students, and told them how—a traveler's blessing—I felt I now had twenty-four friends.

I decided to go because I had a free year.

The Days of the Dead was just such a fiesta. It was a solemn ritual, it was a vigil in graveyards, it was a masquerade, it was a binge, it was an occasion for dressing up and looking fabulous, it included political protest, and it was a party.

I came to see that for him, for most sociopaths, he had no memory—took no responsibility for anything he'd said or done—had no past, no history, it never happened. Memory is essential to conscience; he had no conscience.

conspicuously quizzed.

I had my own compartment - plenty of space, plenty of provisions, the grapes, cookies, chocolates and tea that made being on the Trans-Siberian like a luxurious form of convalescence.

The intrusion of outsiders in the day-to-day lives of Africans was the sort of thing I had always criticized.

Octavio Paz when he writes, "The Mexican chases after death, mocks it, courts it, hugs it, and sleeps with it. He thinks of it as his favorite plaything and his most lasting love.

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

Colonialism oppressed and subverted Africans and remade them as scavengers, pleaders, and servants

All these Mexican speculations seem true to me—death as a party, a plaything, a protest, a somber ritual.

The deep appeal of the seedy" is Graham Greene's expression for certain places (he described it in West Africa), and it was compelling and comforting in Old Mazatlán, an ageless scruffiness, a sense of vitality in decay, an argument against luxury, boutique hotels, and pestering waiters in tailcoats. The pleasure of relaxing on a worn sofa.

told them why I was traveling in Mexico: because the notion of ranging widely in a big country attracted me, and because in the United States, under the current presidential administration, Mexico and Mexicans had been reduced to stereotypes. One great reason to travel, I said, was to destroy the stereotypes.

and in a lifetime of travel had never felt more fully alive

And why was I still here? I felt I was killing time, especially in Russia, which, in spite of all the talk of change and reform, seemed exactly the same place as it had ever been: a pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police.