Quotes from J. Maarten Troost

It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

So you've decided to travel around the world. This is an excellent thing to do. It's a precious place, this planet. We should see it.

Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.

There's a reason that there are oodles of young Aussies, Germans, Japanese, even Chinese backpackers traipsing around the world. They are unencumbered by debilitating student loans. No such luck for the American Theater Arts major with $120,000 in loans.

The gift of sobriety is clarity and a sense of connection - and travel only enhances that.

remembering that human beings cannot produce 20,000 unique sounds, even if you were to include belching and hawking great globs of phlegm (which I think counts in Chinese), the linguistic powers that be--whoever they are--threw in tones, possibly to ensure that no foreigner over the ages of thirty would have any chance whatsoever of understanding that Chinese language.

I learned there [in Mostar] that the distance between civilization and savagery is exceedingly small and this has scared me ever since.

There is one faction that believes George Bush is a simpleton with the brain capacity of plankton, and that is why we are in the mess we're in. Then there's another faction that believes George Bush is not only smarter than plankton, but that he is a diabolical mastermind, possibly even the spawn of Satan himself, and that is why we are in the mess we're in.

What about sharks? I asked. It is one thing to encounter a shark on a reef, where there are so many other tasty nibbles to choose from, but it is another thing altogether to meet a shark in the Open Water, where you are more likely to be treated as an unexpected meal. Yes, I saw sharks, but I couldn't catch them.

One day, after I mistakenly added five garlic cloves to the pesto I'd prepared, rather than the one clove the recipe called for, Sylvia announced that the baby was kicking mightily, and what a strange and wondrous thing it is to put your hand on your wife's belly and feel your child moving like an agitated Mexican jumping bean.

I treated the wound with antibiotic cream and let it close before doing any serious snorkeling—and incidentally, I do very much like the phrase serious snorkeling. If I could somehow figure out a way to incorporate the sentence I'm a serious snorkeler, bitchezz without it seeming like a gratuitous aside, I would. And I guess I just did. It's magic, really.

I had read the book 1421—The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies and become intrigued by his perspective on the era. Menzies, of course

Technically speaking, there are people in Nebraska. live been there. l met both of them.

They say that you can never go home again. You look for everything to be the same and when you find that things have changed, you are left reeling, crestfallen and dazed.

if you're looking to see what the government of Kiribati finally decides to do, when do they wave the flag and say the last good-bye, I'm afraid I can't help you. But look around, follow the news, Google it, bear witness. The very least we could do for the canary is acknowledge its demise.

running is different from drinking in at least one fundamental way—you never regret it when you're done.

I have been called many things in my life, but if there has been but one constant, one barb, one arrow flung my way time after time, it is the accusation that I am, in essence, nothing more than an escapist. Apparently this is bad, suspect, possibly even un-American.

We don't think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms - Katrina, Sandy - are dismissed as once-in-a-century events.

Paradise was always over there, a day's sail away. But it's a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.

Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.

Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.

It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.

No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.