Quotes from The Great Railway Bazaar

“travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home. ”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, "I've got a wife and kids" is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know - how could he? - that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar. The anonymous hotel room in a strange city...”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“The trains [in a country] contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar with its gadgets and passengers represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical. ”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away. ”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“The disorder in Yashar's apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order - the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cozy solidity of a nest.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“.. and I began to think that the strictures of Islam would quickly make me a fancier of the margins of anatomy, thrilling at especially trim ankles, seeking a wink behind a veil, or watching for a response in the shoulders of one of those shrouded forms.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“sightseeing, an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity, flattering oneself with the notion that one is discovering the past when really one is inventing it, using a guidebook as a scenario of swift notations.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“In elk land tonen de treinen de essentiële kenmerken van de cultuur: Thaise treinen hebben de badkruik met de geglazuurde draak op de zijkant, de Ceylonese een wagen die gereserveerd is voor boeddhistische monniken, de Indiase een vegetarische keuken en zes klassen. De Iraanse hun bidmatjes, de Maleisische een noedelstalletje, de Vietnamese kogelvrij glas op de locomotief en in elk rijtuig van de Russische Spoorwegen staat een samovar. De spoorwegbazaar met haar reizigers en vindinkjes vertegenwoordigde de maatschappij zó volmaakt dat je je bij het instappen blootstelde aan het nationale karakter. Soms leek het op een rustige collegezaal, maar soms kreeg ik ook wel eens het gevoel dat ik gevangenzat en werd overvallen door dat monsterachtige 'typische'.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“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. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy – being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveller’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Singhalese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“Less frightening, but no less disgusting, is the Iranian taste for jam made out of carrots.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere; sightseeing”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“Even the smoke of our motherland is sweet and pleasant to us.”)”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

“I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts,”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar

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