Dark Star Safari Quotes

“You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“I added that it was no fun to grow old, but that the compensation for it was that time turned your mental shit-detector into a highly calibrated instrument.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease and speed with which a person could be transported from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone ‘on safari’ is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“Maputo was much praised as a desirable destination, but it was a dreary, beat-up city of desperate people who had cowered there while war raged in the provinces for twenty-five years, destroying bridges, roads, and railways. Banks and donors and charities claimed to have had successes in Mozambique. I suspected they invented these successes to justify their existence; I saw no positive results of charitable efforts. But whenever I expressed skepticism about the economy, the unemployment, the potholes, or the petty thievery, people in Maputo said, as Africans elsewhere did, 'It was much worse before.' In many places, I knew, it was much better before. It was hard to imagine how much worse a place had to be for a broken-down city like Maputo to seem like an improvement.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“THE JOURNEY ENDS, the traveler goes home, the book gets written. The result, the travel narrative, implies that it has fixed the place forever. But that is a meaningless conceit, for time passes, the written-about place keeps changing. All you do as a note-taking traveler is nail down your own vagrant mood on a particular trip. The traveling writer can do no more than approximate a country.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“But so little has changed. This is practically the same country I left thirty-five years ago. Maybe worse. The government doesn’t even care enough to help you.’ This was too broad a subject. She said with what seemed like hesitation but something that was actually a statement of fortitude, ‘It’s – just - light a little candle.’ We passed grass huts, smallholdings of tobacco, some of them being harvested, soggy fields. Not much traffic, though many ragged people marching down the road. ‘My husband is sixty-four. He’s going to retire sometime soon. The government has no plan to replace him. They probably won’t send anyone.’ She looked grim, saying this. ‘If we’re not here, there’ll be no one ‘What’ll happen then?’ ‘They’ll die,’ she said softly. ‘They’ll just die.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presidential suite in the best hotel: the uniformed man seeing you to the elevator, inquiring about your trip, giving you a weather report, and carrying your bags to the suite expects money for this unasked-for attention. Out front, the doorman, gasconading in gold braid, wants a tip for snatching open a cab door, the bartender wants a proportion of your bill, so does the waiter, and chambermaids sometimes leave unambiguous messages, with an accompanying envelope, demanding cash. It is bad enough that people expect something extra for just doing their jobs; it is an even more dismal thought that every smile has a price.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“Not much because all aid is political. When this country (Malawi) became independent it had very few institutions. It still doesn't have many. The donors aren't contributing to development. They maintain the status quo. Politicians love that, because they hate change. The tyrants love aid. Aid helps them stay in power and contributes to underdevelopment. It's not social or cultural and it certainly isn't economic. Aid is one of the main reasons for underdevelopment in Africa.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“Montaigne discussed the hypocrisy of seeing strangers as savage: “every man calls barbarous the thing he is not accustomed to.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“as Henry James had said in a letter to a do-gooding friend, “Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“...it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map.¨”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“I had some good friends - really funny ones. My best friend was a guy called Apolo Nsibambi. We shared an office at the Extra Mural Department at Makerere, and then I got a promotion - became Acting Director - and I was his boss! I used to tease him for calling himself “Doctor” - he had a Ph. D. in political science. I mocked him for wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase and being pompous. I went to his wedding. He came to my wedding. And then I completely lost touch with him. I wonder what happened to him.’ ‘Doctor Nsibambi is the Prime Minister of Uganda.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“Do you know Aggrey Awori?’ Mushana said, ‘He’s an old man.’ Awori was my age, regarded as a miracle of longevity in an AIDS stricken country; a Harvard graduate, Class of ’63, a track star. Thirty years ago, a rising bureaucrat, friend and confidant of the pugnacious prime minister, Milton Obote, a pompous gap-toothed northerner who had placed his trust in a goofy general named Idi Amin. Awori, powerful then, had been something of a scourge and a nationalist, but he was from a tribe that straddled the Kenyan border, where even the politics overlapped: Awori’s brother was a minister in the Kenyan government. ‘Awori is running for president.’ ‘Does he have a chance?’ Mushana shrugged. ‘Museveni will get another term.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“Traveling makes one modest - you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“travel was not about rest and relaxation. It was action, exertion, motion, and the built-in delays were longueurs necessitated by the inevitable problem-solving of forward movement: waiting for buses and trains, enduring breakdowns that you tried to make the best of.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party’s extension, being kept waiting all your working life—the homebound writer’s irritants. Being kept waiting is the human condition.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“Look for the truth in nature, I wanted to say to those cookie-eating missionaries in the next compartment; nothing is complete, everything is imperfect, nothing lasts. Go to bed.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“I was tumbling down the side of a dark star.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

“is”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“but rather a solemn sense that since only Africans could define their problems, only Africans could fix them.”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown

“How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there”
― Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown