Paul Theroux - The Old Patagonian Express (1979)

12 Sourced Quotes

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What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.

Paul Theroux
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.

Paul Theroux
You must not judge people by their country, a lady advised me. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.

Paul Theroux
Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

Paul Theroux
Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash—suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.

Paul Theroux
There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes.

Paul Theroux
A French traveler with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.

Paul Theroux
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.

Paul Theroux
The long morning shadows lay as still and dark as lakes and patterned the rough ground with straight margins.

Paul Theroux
Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.

Paul Theroux
There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable.

Paul Theroux
One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.

Paul Theroux