Lost on Planet China Quotes

“Don't get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria's finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“I had, of course, witnessed hundreds of people in a casino before, mindlessly dropping coins into slot machines. They don't play for money in America. It's true. The big payout is incidental to most gamblers. It's the numbness they're after. Not so in China. No one had that look of glazed stupor often found in American casinos.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“But, as I delved into Chinese for Dummies, I couldn’t help but conclude that the Chinese language is the Great Wall of languages, a clever linguistic barrier erected to keep outsiders out. What, frankly, is wrong with Esperanto? Or alphabets? What is so deficient about an alphabet that uses a judicious twenty-six letters? We can make lots of words with those twenty-six letters, big words even.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“Technically speaking, there are people in Nebraska. live been there. l met both of them.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“There is one faction that believes George Bush is a simpleton with the brain capacity of plankton, and that is why we are in the mess we're in. Then there's another faction that believes George Bush is not only smarter than plankton, but that he is a diabolical mastermind, possibly even the spawn of Satan himself, and that is why we are in the mess we're in.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“...remembering that human beings cannot produce 20,000 unique sounds, even if you were to include belching and hawking great globs of phlegm (which I think counts in Chinese), the linguistic powers that be--whoever they are--threw in tones, possibly to ensure that no foreigner over the ages of thirty would have any chance whatsoever of understanding that Chinese language.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“the television news paused for a commercial--Coming up next: Are we all going to die Tomorrow?”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“1989 played out a little differently in China, of course. When thousands of students converged upon Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand a little democracy--Hey hey, hey ho, Maosim has got to go--they were greeted with a decidedly old school response. Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking gnome with the twinkling eyes who then ruled China, simply reached for his totalitarian rulebook, flipped toward the index--Democracy protesters, suitable response--and followed directions. He shot them. And that was that. Except, of course, it wasn't...”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“the thunder and bombast of what passes for news programming today--Motto: All terror, all the time”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“There will be no fucking sunsets in the pages that follow.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“I had read the book 1421—The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies and become intrigued by his perspective on the era. Menzies, of course,”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid