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 THEROUXMen in their late 50s often make very bad decisions.
More Paul Theroux Quotes
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I think that love isn’t what you think it is when you’re in your twenties or even thirties.
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Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It’s also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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My greatest inspiration is memory.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.
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I don’t look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they weren’t there, there would be no economy. So I understand why a tourist economy is necessary.
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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.
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One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
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The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
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It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.
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The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate’s career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.
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It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.
PAUL THEROUX