On The Plain Of Snakes Quotes

“I believe in every possible manifestation of spiritual strangeness. I believe in all possible escapes. The only thing I cannot endure is reality, whatever it may be. I believe that the writer is defined by the constant necessity of creating a world, to depart from this world. Literature is more concerned with misery than with happiness. Writing is directly related to frustration. It is a reflection of personal desperation. The writer is profoundly disgusted with his reality.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“In the casual opinion of most Americans, I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card; like the old in America generally, either invisible or someone to ignore rather than respect, who will be gone soon, and forgotten, a gringo in his degringolade.
Naturally I am insulted by this, but out of pride I don’t let my indignation show. My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance. And I think of myself in the Mexican way, not as an old man but as most Mexicans regard a senior, an hombre de juicio, a man of judgement; not ruco, worn out, beneath notice, someone to be patronized, but owed the respect traditionally accorded to an elder, someone (in the Mexican euphemism) of La Tercera Edad, the Third Age, who might be called Don Pablo or tio (uncle) in deference. Mexican youths are required by custom to surrender their seat to anyone older. They know the saying: Mas sabe el diablo por viejo, que por diablo - The devil is wise because he’s old, not because he’s the devil. But “Stand aside, old man, and make way for the young” is the American way.
As an Ancient Mariner of a sort, I want to hold the doubters with my skinny hand, fix them with a glittering eye, and say, “I have been to a place where none of you have ever been, where none of you can ever go. It is the past. I spent decades there and I can say, you don’t have the slightest idea.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey

“It seemed that his anger was partly theatrical, that he was amping up his shouts to intimidate me.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“city of twenty-three million. Half of this huge number of chilangos—as the Mexico City dwellers call themselves—are classified as enduring dire poverty, many enjoying extreme wealth, and an estimated fifteen thousand children live on the street.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“When she was done, I talked to her a little—and I was the only one.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“children playing with flashing toys,”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“and the relief of being able to walk around without having to search for a parking place added to the pleasure of strolling”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“border, Signs Preceding the End of the World.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“We take thirteen tortillas and put them on the house altar after a death. Every day we divide one tortilla into small pieces, and we share it. And we are also sharing it with the departed one.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“how in Mexico nothing is forgotten, how the past exists in the present.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on a hillside,” Joyce writes in Ulysses. “For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother.”
― Paul Theroux, On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Road Trip

“But no sooner had I gotten behind the wheel than a feeling came over me that was like being caressed by a cosmic wind, reminding me of what travel at its best can do: I was set free.”
― Paul Theroux, On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Road Trip

“Write the story of a contemporary cured of his heartbreaks solely by long contemplation of a landscape,”
― Paul Theroux, On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Road Trip

“Strollers see more, and are more polite, than drivers.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“Felipe guided me into the nearby building and upstairs to the weaving room, where there were seven head-high wooden looms, some of the weavers sitting, thrusting the shuttles at right angles through the tight threads, pulling the beams down, working the treadles, and in all that effort—the rattle of skeletal frames and the stamping of treadles—lengthening the cloth by one thread. (Recalling that, it seems a fit image for what I am doing now, fussing with my fingers and hesitating, then tightening the line and starting again, minutes passing, this memory of weaving enlarged by one sentence.)”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“What do I miss? Food and friends. The diversity of culture,” José Miguel said. “And if you work hard, the money’s good. This isn’t true in Mexico. You can work hard here and still earn very little. What I don’t like about Mexico is the paperwork—and especially the poverty. In the States you have poor people, but generally they’re the ones who don’t want to work. Here we have poor people, but poor because they have no opportunities. It’s sad.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“There was a good reason for Oaxaca being unaltered, and unalterable. A few days after arriving in this colonial town in a high valley, justly celebrated for its beauty and its traditions, I was reminded again of how “the past of a place survives in its poor”—how the poor tend to keep their cultural identity intact. They depend on its compass and continuity and its pleasures for their self-esteem, while the rising classes and the rich tend to rid themselves of their old traditions, except in a showy or ritualized way, because they became wealthy by resisting them and breaking rules.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“Teasing, especially the public sort, as well as the joshing in a joking relationship, always contains an element of hostility.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“The deep appeal of the seedy” is Graham Greene’s expression for certain places (he described it in West Africa), and it was compelling and comforting in Old Mazatlán, an ageless scruffiness, a sense of vitality in decay, an argument against luxury, boutique hotels, and pestering waiters in tailcoats. The pleasure of relaxing on a worn sofa.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“Related to fertility, the bat was known in Zapotec as bigidiri zinnia—flesh butterfly (mariposa de carne)—and was a benign god.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“It was Muriel Spark, in her novel Memento Mori: “If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“This mention of Juan Villoro was fortuitous. He is one of Mexico’s most illustrious writers, a”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, and Aldous Huxley—all visitors, inspired in their writing by their immersion in Oaxaca—would recognize”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“Frida is a detour and a distraction. It was her genius as an artist, and her neurotic narcissism, to turn her whole self into art—her love, her suffering, her accident-prone life—and in the process make herself an icon, for the Mexican tradition is full of icons, especially of madonnas.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“shadowy literary history of Othón and you see that his poems were translated into English by Samuel Beckett. It was not his wasteland weariness that appealed to Beckett—though the wasteland predominates—but rather Beckett’s need for money.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“Texas congressman had called it “an inefficient fourteenth-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem,” which was accurate because, like a medieval wall, it was merely a symbol of exclusion rather than anything practical, and easily climbed over or tunneled under.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“It was an event, it was a party, and it was also an affirmation of family and community; and I understood Felipe—who was at the table—who had said to me how everyone in the States had been kind to him, but “the thing I missed most was eating with my family.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“cabrón,”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“Zapatistas.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – A Humanizing Exploration of the US-Mexico Border, Immigration Debate, and the Layered World of a Region in Conflict

“I'm a writer," I said. "I like long stories.”
― Paul Theroux, On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey