Quote

Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Level
Irresistible
Along
Improving
Drink
Perfectly
Levels
Upset
Matter
Landscape
Bazaars
Never
Mood
Railways
Speed
Upsetting
Travel
Railway

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Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
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If people are driving you around to look at animals, that's wonderful. That's educational, but it's not necessarily enlightening and you're not finding out much about yourself.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.
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Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
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