The Old Patagonian Express Quotes

“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, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“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, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“A slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“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, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather, a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“A British traveler remarked, 'There are [fashions in Guatemala] which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect...'"

FILL IN YOUR OWN GRIPES! ;-)”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“was planned by the American Henry Meiggs,”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“Politics is a hideous subject, but I will say this: people tell you that dictatorships are sometimes necessary to good order, and that this sort of highly centralized government is stable and dependable. But this is seldom so. It is nearly always bureaucratic and crooked, unstable, fickle, and barbarous; and it excites those same qualities in those it governs.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash—suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“desert is an empty canvas; it is you who give it features and a mood, who work at creating the mirage and making it live. But I was incurious; the desert was deserted, as empty as I felt.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“It was no wonder that, seeing them as degenerate states, tycoons like Vanderbilt and imperial-minded companies like the United Fruit Company took them over and tried to run them. It should have been easy enough. But tycoons and big companies did not have the morality or the compassion or the sense of legality to make these places work; they acted out of contempt and self-interest; they were less than colonial—they were racketeers, and they spawned racketeers. Lawless, the countries became bizarre with inequality, and hideously violent.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“On the evidence here, it seemed an American obsession, a kind of image worship I associated with the most primitive political minds.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express

“Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express

“I had a political reverie on that train. It was this: the government held elections, encouraged people to vote, and appeared to be democratic. The army appeared to be impartial, the newspapers disinterested. And it remained a peasant society, basically underfed and unfree. It must perplex any peasant to be told he is living in a free country, when the facts of his life contradict this. It might be that this does not perplex him; he has every reason to believe, in accordance with the evidence, that democracy is feudal, a bureaucracy run by crooks and trigger-happy vigilantes. When one sees a government of the Guatemalan sort professing such high-mindedness in its social aims and producing such mediocre results, one cannot be surprised if the peasant concludes that communism might be an improvement. It was a Latin American sickness: inferior government gave democracy an evil name and left people no option but to seek an alternative. The cynic might say—I met many who did—that these people are better off with an authoritarian government. I happen to think this is nonsense. From Guatemala to Argentina, the majority of the countries are run by self-serving tyrannies that are only making the merciless vengeance of anarchy inevitable. The shabby deceits were as apparent from this train as a row of Burma-Shave signs.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“Another train, with seat numbers and compartments, might have thrown us together, and I would have suffered his leaden company for two days. If there was a virtue in the disorder of this carelessly run Mexican train, it was that it allowed a passenger the freedom of its shabby cars. There were no rules; or, if there were, no one followed them. So it was easy for me to reject the companionship of this fellow—not that he offered any. Tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash—suspicious, unbelieving, and incurious. In a way, I admired his aloofness, though his aloofness was inspired by nothing more admirable than his egoism and his craving for the cheap. And yet, by refusing to take any risk, he was taking the greatest risk of all: being solitary in a place so hot and anarchic that one really needed friends.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“I wondered what it must be like to be born in a place like this, where only the foreground—the porch, the storefront, the main street—mattered. The rest was emptiness, or did it only seem that way to me because I was a stranger, passing through on a train? I had no wish to stop. The Oklahoman or Texan celebrates his freedom and speaks of the confinement of the New Yorker; but these towns struck me as confining to a suffocating degree. There was a pattern of defensiveness in the way they were laid out, as if they had simply sprung out of a common fear. And the pattern? It was that of a circle of wagons. And the small oblong houses even had the look of wagons—wagons without wheels, which had been parked there for no better reason than that there were others already there. The land was vast, but the houses were in huddles, regarding the neighbors and the narrow street, their backs turned to the immense spaces of the prairie.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“The solution is simple: if we passed a law requiring United States farmers to hire only men with entry visas and work permits, there would be no problem. There is no such law. The farm lobby has made sure of that, for if there were no Mexicans to exploit, how would these barrel-assed slavers be able to harvest their crops?”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“I turned to the flyleaf and wrote: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty. No privacy, no relief. Constant stopping and starting, broken engine, howling passengers. On days like this I wonder why I bother: leaving order and friends for disorder and strangers. I’m homesick and feel punished for my selfishness in leaving. Precisely what Crusoe says on his island. Impossible to get comfortable in this seat. A jail atmosphere: the brown walls and dim light of the condemned cell. Noise, too: a factory din, our pile-driving sound, hammered back at us through open windows from the close walls of jungle beside the track.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“I did not share their joy or feel very kindly toward any of them,”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“The train was sunlit and emptier.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“Yet because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what’s the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

“But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.”
― Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas