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
Travel
Railway
Level
Irresistible
Along
Improving
Drink
Perfectly
Levels
Upset
Matter
Landscape
Bazaars
Never
Mood
Railways
Speed
Upsetting

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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
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There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.
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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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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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The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive.
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Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.
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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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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.
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The biggest surprise was that a country like Angola, that has so much money, that produces so much oil, would be in such a mess and so difficult to travel in. Something is almost cursed in striking oil. It's like the lottery winner who ends up broke.
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I think I understand passion. Love is something else.
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Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life
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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.
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You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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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.
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Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
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