The collection / 69 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1941 AD

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

Paul Theroux / quote

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02c. 1941 AD

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

Paul Theroux / quote

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03c. 1941 AD

There's always a way if you're not in a hurry.

Paul Theroux / quote

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04c. 1941 AD

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars... Anything is possible on a train...

Paul Theroux / quote

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05c. 1941 AD

Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it.

Paul Theroux / quote

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06c. 1941 AD

...luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose...

Paul Theroux / quote

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07c. 1941 AD

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back

Paul Theroux / quote

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08c. 1941 AD

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.

Paul Theroux / quote

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09c. 1941 AD

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

Paul Theroux / quote

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10c. 1941 AD

I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.

Paul Theroux / quote

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11c. 1941 AD

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.

Paul Theroux / quote

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12c. 1941 AD

Last days? Don't they know? These are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.

Paul Theroux / quote

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13c. 1941 AD

Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

Paul Theroux / quote

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14c. 1941 AD

As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again.

Paul Theroux / quote

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15c. 1941 AD

At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.

Paul Theroux / quote

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16c. 1941 AD

...it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map.¨

Paul Theroux / quote

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17c. 1941 AD

The people of Hong Kong are criticized for only being interested in business, but it's the only thing they've been allowed to do.

Paul Theroux / quote

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18c. 1941 AD

Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone.

Paul Theroux / quote

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19c. 1941 AD

I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.

Paul Theroux / quote

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20c. 1941 AD

Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.

Paul Theroux / quote

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21c. 1941 AD

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

Paul Theroux / quote

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22c. 1941 AD

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

Paul Theroux / quote

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23c. 1941 AD

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

Paul Theroux / quote

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24c. 1941 AD

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.

Paul Theroux / quote

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