Quotes from Paul Theroux

A train journey is travel; everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands.—GRB

the susurrus slowly dying away to a vibrant silence.

I saw a stranger yestreen. I put food in the eating place, Drink in the drinking place, Music in the listening place— And the lark in its song sang! 'Often, often, often, often, Comes the Christ in the stranger's guise.

I turned seventy in the Kalahari Desert and defended myself against oafs in the stink and misery of northern Angola. All these trips, ten of them, became books.

I found it depressing that no one in Mongolia should know anything of Chernobyl, especially when they themselves had the same sort of nuclear power plants. It was bad enough that they have been colonized and occupied by the Soviets, but it was much worse that this paternalism was taken so literally that they were treated like children and not told anything.

the predominating characteristic of the Chinese was stoicism

Do you know where it is—the church?" More murmurs, the students conferring, a shaking of heads: no one had a clue. "So this is something we have to do!" I said, and they laughed.

Transportation in China is always crowded; it is nearly always uncomfortable; it is often a struggle.

sucking on the secret like candy.

Most intellectuals were sent into the countryside-to farms and into the mountains. They went to the most backward provinces, like Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu. And Mongolia. Lots of intellectuals ended up in Mongolia. They had to suffer.

on my trip whenever I felt obstructed or low, I thought of this valiant woman, and moved on.

It was an event, it was a party, and it was also an affirmation of family and community; and I understood Felipe—who was at the table—who had said to me how everyone in the States had been kind to him, but "the thing I missed most was eating with my family.

On September 26–27, 2014, scores of Iguala, Cocula, and Huitzuco police collaborated with Guerrero state police and federal police to carry out hours of horrific violence against unarmed college students, while the Mexican army watched from the shadows.

When I considered that it was still illegal for a foreigner to talk at random with any Chinese citizen-the old rule was seldom enforced, but it was a well-known rule nonetheless-I was grateful for this frankness. The healthiest sign in China was this straight talk.

Operation Hold the Line in 1993 in the El Paso sector.

Operation Hold the Line in 1993 in the El Paso sector. "The idea was to put a huge number of Border Patrol agents in urban areas

the NAFTA accord meant that American manufacturing slid into Mexico, crossing the border but not descending very far. In fact, it seemed to be a rule that these companies were determined to stay within hailing distance of the United States, a few minutes' drive for their products to be shipped over the border. Most American factories in Mexico were visible from the US.

We walk through ourselves," Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, summing up the travel experience, "meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

The glare of gas station rest stops, mystical, comet-like as they rushed past, but melancholy and ordinary when we paused for the ten-minute breaks.

Some of those people ended up in the maquiladoras

the banality of the rational world and its street signs and lampposts asserted itself.

It is rare in Mexico to meet someone who has no family connection to the US.

I went to the Yungang Caves outside Datong, where travelers used to draw chalk circles on the beautiful frescoes and Chinese workmen would hack them off the wall and wrap them up; and where another lively business was the beheading of Buddhas. Even so, there are plenty of Buddhas left-and several in the larger caves are as tall as a three-story building.

I kept the letter those forty years as a talisman, as a goad, and as a rare example of the severe honesty of someone who seldom told the truth.