Quotes from Paul Theroux

Many Americans were bewildered by having to accommodate themselves to the resettlement of Syrian, Somali, and Afghan refugees—their care and feeding—when many local communities were hard-up.

to be anonymous and traveling in an interesting place is an intoxication

He used the word savages with affection, as if he liked them a little for it. In his nature was a respect for wildness. He saw it as a personal challenge, something that could be put right with an idea or a machine. He felt he had the answer to most problems, if anyone cared to listen.

its workforce composed of assembly-line workers as well as highly educated graduates of the city's sixteen universities and institutes of technology.

And President Clinton's success in concluding 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.

America seemed insecure, violent, and wayward; and President Obama appeared detached and indecisive.

a city of poor housing and low spirits, of people living in the hovels Mexicans call jacales—workers' quarters, like plantation housing—and that none of the workers in the Oster factory had in their shack one of the coffee machines they toiled to make.

within walking distance of every historical sight, and it provided a garage where my car would not be stolen or vandalized.

the presumptuousness of Hillary Clinton, who was so certain of winning that she campaigned halfheartedly

but rather a solemn sense that since only Africans could define their problems, only Africans could fix them.

But Potosí was poor, and Potosinos were oppressed by the weakening peso and the high cost of living, and in such a situation—I had noticed this all over the American Deep South on my previous road trip—people hold on to their culture.

He played on the distrust of the Clintons and subtly disparaged the Republican Party.

My secret was sad, but at least it was my secret; it was something to hold on to.

My ideal traveler is the person who goes the old, laborious way into the unknown, and it is this belief that lies behind my travel, and drives me.

Mayhem and uncertainty in Mexico caused the US State Department to devise, in 2018, a new, four-tier advisory system for travelers to the country, to replace the previous system of unspecific travel warnings and travel alerts: Level 1, Exercise Normal Precautions (much of Mexico); Level 2, Exercise Increased Caution (Cancún, Cozumel, Mexico City); Level 3, Reconsider Travel (Guadalajara, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco); and Level 4, Do Not Travel (Acapulco, Zihuatanejo, Taxco).

Eagle Pass seemed a town in decline.

cling to—they have little else to cling to.

Part of the reason for police shakedowns

Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned—volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So—writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life

England resembles a ship in its shape' wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Traits. He was wrong... England, of course, resembles a pig, with something on its back. Look at it. It is a hurrying pig; its snout is the south-west in Wales, and its reaching trotters are Cornwall, and its rump is East Anglia. The whole of Britain looks like a witch riding on a pig, and these contours - rump and snout and bonnet, and the scowling face of Western Scotland - were my route.

Adventure is the unexpected experience of discovery, of course; but it is also a kind of death, an end of innocence.

In my what-am-I-doing-here? mood Akisha was a timely lesson. She made a point of staying positive, didn't grumble, never gossiped, and she expected the best from her students. She was also a passionate photographer, and though her talk was always upbeat, her photographs were a record of all she had seen.

Here at Sudan the students humiliated their teachers,' she said. 'But in the high schools it was not unknown for students to beat their teachers to death.

on the border itself, the US immigration officer answered one of my questions by saying, "I have no idea. I don't have a clue. I have never been there"—and raised his blue arm and the yellow nail of his hairy finger to point across fifty feet of sunny road to Mexico.