Quote

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.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
World
Observation
Luxury
Induces
Enemy
Spoils
Feeling
Costly
Knowing
Prevents
Feelings
Indulgence
Nothing
Spoil
Good
Notice

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I sought trains I found passengers.
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I think I understand passion. Love is something else.
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The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.
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I'm constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
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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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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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I don't want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
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I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.
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The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.
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A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.
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Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.
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I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don't want to relax. I want to see something.
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Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
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...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
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He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
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Railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.
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I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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