Sunrise With Seamonsters Quotes

“I cannot see much good in the world or much likelihood of good. There seems to me a definite bias in human nature towards ill, towards the immediate convenience, the ugly, the cheap ... I rub my hands and say 'Hurry up, you foulers of a good world, and destroy yourselves faster'.”
― Paul Theroux, Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries, 1964-1984

“His last project was his favorite, a movie script of Milton's Paradise Lost. In an interview, Collier said, "I think the theme of Paradise Lost is singularly suited to attract a wide audience, and especially the young audience, of today. It is quasi-religious, quasi-scientific, and deeply humanistic, being the thrilling story, with which we can all identify, of how innocent, vegetarian, Proconsul or Pithecanthropus was caught up in the guerrilla war waged by Satan against the authoritarian universe, and how he emerged as moral and immoral, curious, inspired, murderous and suffering Man." The film was not made but the script was published as "A Screenplay for the Cinema of the Mind" in America in 1973. It is an astonishing thing—not quite what Milton intended—and Satan is the hero.”
― Paul Theroux, Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries, 1964-1984

“The leaves fly down, the rain spits and the clouds flow like a dirty thaw before the wind, which whines and mews in the window cracks and swings the wireless aerial with a dull tap against the sill; the House of Usher is falling, and between now and Hogmanay, as the draughts lift the carpets, as slates shift on the roof and mice patter behind the wainscot, the ghosts, the wronged suitors of our lives, gather in the anterooms of the mind.”
― Paul Theroux, Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries, 1964-1984