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Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux Quotes

Film writer

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Famous Paul Theroux Quotes

“One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company --- they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing...”

LonelinessInsecurity
Book:The Mosquito Coast
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“Even in Africa, I had never seen such a profusion of stars as I saw on these clear nights on Pacific isles - not only big beaming planets and small single pinpricks... but also glittering clouds of them - the whole dome of the sky crowded with thick shapes formed from stars, overlaid with more shapes, a brilliant density, like a storm of light over a black depthless sea, made brighter still by twisting auroras composed of tiny star grains - points of light so fine and numerous they seemed like luminous vapor, the entire sky hung with veils of light like dazzling smoke... they made night in Oceania as vast and dramatic as day.”

NightStarsNatureBeautyTravelConstellationsAuroraOceania
Book:The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific
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“Politics is a hideous subject, but I will say this: people tell you that dictatorships are sometimes necessary to good order, and that this sort of highly centralized government is stable and dependable. But this is seldom so. It is nearly always bureaucratic and crooked, unstable, fickle, and barbarous; and it excites those same qualities in those it governs.”

PoliticsDictatorships
Book:The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas
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“And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.”

TravelTravel WritingRailwaySouth America
Book:The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas
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“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.”

Mongolia
Book:Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China
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“...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.¨”

AfricaTravelogueMythomania
Book:Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
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“In the casual opinion of most Americans, I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card; like the old in America generally, either invisible or someone to ignore rather than respect, who will be gone soon, and forgotten, a gringo in his degringolade. Naturally I am insulted by this, but out of pride I don’t let my indignation show. My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance. And I think of myself in the Mexican way, not as an old man but as most Mexicans regard a senior, an hombre de juicio, a man of judgement; not ruco, worn out, beneath notice, someone to be patronized, but owed the respect traditionally accorded to an elder, someone (in the Mexican euphemism) of La Tercera Edad, the Third Age, who might be called Don Pablo or tio (uncle) in deference. Mexican youths are required by custom to surrender their seat to anyone older. They know the saying: Mas sabe el diablo por viejo, que por diablo - The devil is wise because he’s old, not because he’s the devil. But “Stand aside, old man, and make way for the young” is the American way. As an Ancient Mariner of a sort, I want to hold the doubters with my skinny hand, fix them with a glittering eye, and say, “I have been to a place where none of you have ever been, where none of you can ever go. It is the past. I spent decades there and I can say, you don’t have the slightest idea.”

WisdomExperienceAgeingSenior Citizen
Book:On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey
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“Tijdens een van mijn avondwandelingen belandde ik bij toeval in de Rua de Almeida Garrett (een zijstraat van Avenida Ho Chi Minh). Die was genoemd naar João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, een negentiende-eeuwse Portugese schrijver en politicus, die in de Verenigde Staten weinig gekend was, en in Angola nog minder. Ik kende hem alleen van een motto in een roman van José Saramago, een uitspraak die reuze toepasselijk was in Luanda: 'Ik vraag de economen en de moralisten of ze ooit wel eens hebben berekend hoeveel individuen veroordeeld moeten worden tot lijden, zwaar werk, demoralisatie, een ellendige jeugd, volstrekte onwetendheid, overweldigende rampspoed en de opperste armoede om één rijke man voort te brengen?”

EconomieKapitalismeArmoede
Book:The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
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“Ik dacht: dit is het gelach in de schaduw van de galg, zo klinken mensen die weten dat ze ten dode zijn opgeschreven, zo ziet een stad eruit die naar de verdommenis gaat. Diezelfde hysterie tref je aan in de beschrijving die Thucydides geeft wanneer de pest uitbreekt in Athene: 'Overweldigd door de hevigheid van de rampspoed, en niet wetend wat hen te doen stond, werden de mannen onverschillig [...] en de grote losbandigheid begon.' Net als de inwoners van Athene deden de Angolezen uit de musseque alsof het einde der tijden was aangebroken: een schreeuwerige, chaotische, bandeloze samenleving die op de rand van uitsterven verkeerde. Geen wanhopige mensen, maar mensen die dansten, die de kiduru en de kizomba deden, zoals Kalunga me uitlegde toen de meisjes in de sloppenwijk in het rond stonden te draaien en soms wat danspasjes invoegden onder het lopen. Het wemelde van de prostituees in de stad, veelal vluchtelingen uit Congo, die mannen oppikten in de Pub Royal en de Zanzibar. De meeste mensen giechelden als gekken omdat ze beseften dat hun dagen geteld waren. Zo klonk dat Angolese gelach mij in de oren: als geraaskal dat getuigde van groot lijden, als versterkt doodsgereutel. Net als de inwoners van Athene hing hen rampspoed of de dood boven het hoofd en 'besloten ze te genieten van een klein deel van hun leven'. Kalunga stapte op zijn motorfiets, maar startte hem niet. Hij zat uit te kijken over de stad en zei: 'Zo zal de wereld eruitzien wanneer het einde der tijden is aangebroken.”

Pandemie
Book:The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
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“Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same--tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one.”

KindArtArtistCertainOrderSocialPaintingDependsSucceedPainfulFriendlyComposerInsecureSociabilityOrder To Succeed
Book:The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain
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