Quotes from Paul Theroux

Look for the truth in nature, I wanted to say to those cookie-eating missionaries in the next compartment; nothing is complete, everything is imperfect, nothing lasts. Go to bed.

I travel to find obstacles, to discover my limits, to ease the passage of time

I'm going to have real tea," she said. I smiled in confusion. "With your tea bag," Beth said, and reached across the table to the saucer where my discarded tea bag lay like a dead mouse. Being a resourceful traveler, she popped the thing into her cup.

Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists.

You can work hard here and still earn very little.

One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy—at the time, not afterwards. Most people don't realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.

Tempted by the names

Mexicans spend very little time railing against the US government, because in their experience, government by its very nature is corrupt, often criminal, and the poor are its victims.

Here we have poor people, but poor because they have no opportunities. It's sad.

drove up the road and into the foothills to Huayapam, a simple drive, my car bouncing on the speed bumps, the topes and corrugations.

We eat when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty, buy what we don't need, and throw away everything that's useful. Don't sell a man what he wants—sell him what he doesn't want. Pretend he's got eight feet and two stomachs and money to burn. That's not illogical—it's evil.

After a week, in the casual outdoor hour on the veranda or under the royal palms, Herman introduced us to Mexican card games and trivia quizzes, and cartoons that required us to explain in Spanish what was happening to the little dog in the snowstorm, or the bewitched doll in the toy shop. And there were toys, too, little trucks and cars and tiny buildings, which we held and made the subject of a story.

All serious travelers arrive at this doubting, why-bother juncture, stalling on the road, sometime or other.

The woman went to a table at the side and selected a ghoulish picture the size of a playing card. "How much?" "What you wish." I gave her some pesos, saying, "I'll come back." "This"—she tapped the picture—"will keep you safe.

nothing is more indicative of a war going badly than valiant propaganda ... Anything officially denied was probably a fact.

look across the culvert that holds the greenish residue of the Rio Grande

sweatshops in Juárez.

His education was sketchy, yet he was immensely learned in the oblique and selective way of someone self-taught.

If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life—the homebound writer's irritants. Being kept waiting is the human condition.

Laughlin Air Force Base

He said that he believe that Nixon's visit to China had something to do with his release, because some of the people accompanying Nixon in 1972 showed an interest in political prisoners and had asked to visit prisons. 'Usually, we got one thin slice of meat a week. If the wind was strong it blew away. But just before President Nixon's visit we started to get three pieces. The prison guards were afraid that he might visit and ask how we were being treated.

the horrendous gash of its mine-works

desperation is often a rationale for exploitation

San Luis Potosí is a victim of the usual Mexican pattern of the old harmonious colonial city brutally martyred in the cause of modernization—officialdom destroying it in order to make it live.