Deep South Quotes

“Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don’t bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South.” What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“A reader meeting another reader is an encounter of kindred spirits. The pleasure of such a joyous event is impossible to describe to a nonreader, and why would I bother? But you, with this book in your hand, are familiar with the phenomenon, and so it is not necessary.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic,”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“Faulkner first spoke about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the hypocrisy of boasting of our values to our enemies “after we have taught them (as we are now doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don’t even mean security and justice and even not the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours.” He went on to say that if Americans are to survive, we will have to show the world that we are not racists, “to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front.” Yet this might be a test we will fail: “Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive.” And his damning conclusion: “Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“January snow lay thick on the ground—crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state’s contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace’s, Martin Luther King’s, and Bear Bryant’s.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“From state to state, county to county, I breezed along, and this progress was a way of understanding how lucky I was, because the confinement that Southerners feel, their keen awareness of themselves as stereotypes—provincials and yokels, in literature, in life—is something palpable. No wonder, given the obliqueness of Southern fiction (and one way to know a place is through its writing)—the evasions, the jokes, the showy literary metaphors. No wonder the grotesque preponderance of the gothic and the freaks—the reality was too brutal to state baldly, unbearably so.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“was reminded that the South is full of army vets from small towns and humble homes, the military their escape, sometimes their salvation, often their burden, and now and then their punishment.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“Bumper stickers too, one reading The Civil War—America’s Holocaust. Another, Hey Liberal, You’re the Reason We Have the 2nd Amendment, and many denouncing President Obama: NObama, Obummer, Obamanation, and Advocates of Gun Control: Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Obama.”
― Steve McCurry, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“We tolerate difference only when we don’t have to look at it or listen to it, as long as it doesn’t impact our lives.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“Lines from William Blake’s Jerusalem came to mind: He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“insight,” and the “message” of his books (which is no message at all) is similar to Gogol’s in Nabokov’s summary: “Something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics engaged in petty pursuits that seem to them very important, while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs.” By reputation Portis is reclusive, yet”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“insight,” and the “message” of his books (which is no message at all) is similar to Gogol’s in Nabokov’s summary: “Something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics engaged in petty pursuits that seem to them very important, while an”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“university”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“An airport is an obstacle course, and because of that it can sour you on the whole notion of travel. By degrees, over the years, the airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control. Such is the clumsy questioning of motives”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“Our great gift as a country is its size and its relative emptiness, its elbow room. That space allows for difference and is often mistaken for tolerance. The person who dares to violate that space is the real traveler.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“His book accurately reflects what I feel in traveling in America—the solitary road trip that is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on earth.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“Finally, this being America,” Bryson says at another point, “there is the constant possibility of murder.” The bears leave him alone, he is not murdered, and apart from sore feet, he is hardly inconvenienced in what is, for all its mock ordeals, a likable book.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“What I saw, what I experienced, the freedom of the trip, the people I met, the things I learned: my days were filled with road candy.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“thought of Almeida Garrett, the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese traveler and philosopher. An inspiration to me, Garrett had taken a trip in his own country, chronicled in Travels in My Homeland (Viagens na Minha Terra), and seeing the poverty, he had formulated a question: “I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralization, degradation, rank ignorance, overwhelming misfortune and utter penury in order to produce one rich man.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic, maintaining the delusion that it is travel. This is the equivalent of being measured like a projectile and being shot out of a cannon, and that’s how most of us feel in such a state, like a human cannonball, dazed and confused, in the company of other cannonballs.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“Raging politeness,” this extreme friendliness is sometimes termed, but even if that is true, it is better than the cold stare or the averted eyes or the calculated snub I was used to in New England.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“I said I was a stranger here. “Ain’t no strangers here, baby,” she said, and gave me a merry smile.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“On the sunny day that I spent walking its streets I was reminded that Philadelphia (Mississippi) is still the headquarters of the Mississippi Klan. I easily found the headquarters and the free leaflets. "...It's a Klansman's responsibility to register to vote, campaign, and vote for conservative pro white candidates who will put America first and defend our nation's borders.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“Telling the truth and being ethical often keeps people from political power, but doing the right thing, always, without exception, is all that matters in the long run, and is ultimately powerful. That’s why the true heroes of the civil rights struggle were never politicians. They were humble folk on a mission, enduring sit-ins and organizing marches and debates. When they began to succeed, the politicians, seeing an opportunity, followed them.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“which proved yet again, as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

“In one case, at a meeting at Alpha Gamma Delta, “active sorority members . . . began standing up to voice support for the [black] recruit and challenge alumnae decisions.” “The entire house wanted this girl to be in Alpha Gam,” one of the sisters at Alpha Gamma Delta said.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads