Tahir Shah · 240 pages
Rating: (110 votes)
“The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“As the head of an expedition, you can't pussyfoot around being polite to everyone. You have to show your teeth once in a while; a little growling goes a long way.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“The quest for a lost city erodes your body, damaging you beyond all reason. But it is your mind that bears the heaviest toll. Listen to the doubters, the worriers and the weak, and the vaguest hope of success evaporates.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“There are two ways to find a lost city. The first is to rely on luck alone, the second is to control all the information.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“The situation was different in the jungle. Every inch of ground had to be earned, and was done so through much exertion with the blade.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Normally I would have been the first to go in search of cannibal monks, particularly as I had heard of a similar tradition at a nunnery in the Philippines. It's the sort of quest I can't resist.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“The rain of Madre de Dios is similar to that of the Amazon, but there is a petrifying aspect to it, as if it seeks to wound rather than to nurture.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“The ability to tell a good route from a terrible one is a valuable skill when leading an expedition. Unfortunately for us all, it was a skill I did not possess.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Only a man who has his health, a full stomach and wears clean clothes would ever entertain the notion of tracking down the greatest lost city on Earth.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Previous experience had taught me that any expedition marches on its stomach.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“In some warped way, having an embalmed body with us made perfect sense.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“The only thing they valued higher than ammunition were Man United footballs.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“As I saw it, a little threatening was a good thing. It kept the men on their toes.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“As I see the world, there's one element that's even more corrosive than missionaries: tourists. It's not that I feel above them in any way, but that the very places they patronize are destroyed by their affection.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Running an expedition can bring out the worst in a man. It can make you a power-crazed monster.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“The porters could always be coaxed to continue a little further through driving rain by the mere suggestion of a Pot Noodle at the end.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Ours was not going to be a clone of the usual expeditions, oozing with sleekness. It was clear from the start that oddity was our advantage.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
Tahir Shah
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
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“An incomplete list:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.
No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.
No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, quote from Station Eleven
“Refuse the anxiety. When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next, and poisons the next with pre-judgment.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Ship of Magic
“After all, as long as you know, why make when you can take?”
― Brandon Mull, quote from Grip of the Shadow Plague
“Marie, let’s suppose that two firemen go into a forest to put out a small fire. Afterwards, when they emerge and go over to a stream, the face of one is all smeared with black, while the other man’s face is completely clean. My question is this: which of the two will wash his face?
That’s a silly question. The one with the dirty face of course.’
No, the one with the dirty face will look at the other man and assume that he looks like him. And, vice versa, the man with the clean face will see his colleague covered in grime and say to himself: I must be dirty too. I’d better have a wash.’
What are you trying to say?’
I’m saying that, during the time I spent in the hospital, I came to realize that I was always looking for myself in the women I loved. I looked at their lovely, clean faces and saw myself reflected in them. They, on the other hand, looked at me and saw the dirt on my face and, however intelligent or self-confident they were, they ended up seeing themselves reflected in me thinking that they were worse than they were. Please, don’t let that happen to you.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from The Zahir
“Nie entschuldigen, Baby. Nie reden. Blumen schicken. Ohne Brief. Nur Blumen. Die decken alles zu. Sogar Gräber.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from Three Comrades
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