The Sex Lives of Cannibals Quotes

“Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish."

"Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“It is an unfortunate reality for innate idlers that our modern world requires one to hold a job to maintain a sustainable existence. Idling, I find, if immensely underrated, even vilified by some who see inactivity as the gateway for the Evil One.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“...I had grown accustomed to life being interesting and adventure ridden and, rather childishly, I refused to believe that this must necessarily come to an end and that the rest of my life should be a sort of penance for all the reckless, irresponsible, and immensely fun things I'd done before.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“The longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself swept away in a lagoonside maneaba rumbling to the frenzied singing and dancing of hundreds of rapturous islanders. And there are the crushing lows, when you succumb to a listless depression, brought about by the unyielding heat, sporadic sickness, pitiless isolation, food shortages, and the realization that so much of what ails Tarawa, the overpopulation and all its attendant health and social problems, need not be as bad as it is.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“Stevenson, though, Was soon enough reduced to the timeless lamentations of the I-Matang on an atoll: "I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips," he wrote in a letter. And elsewhere: "I had learned to welcome shark's fresh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or beefsteak, had long had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“The I-Kiribati are a remarkably musical people. Everyone sings. There is something arresting about seeing a tough-looking teenage boy suddenly put a flower behind his ear and begin to croon.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“I made arrangements with Bitaki, a teammate on the soccer team I played with, to go fishing with his brothers, who typically worked the waters off Maiana, the nearest island south of Tarawa. When I mentioned to Sylvia that I was going, she said: “No, you’re not.” “And what do you mean by ‘No, you’re not’?” I determined right then that I would go out fishing every week. No, every day. I would become a professional fisherman. I would become sun-browned and sea-weathered. I would smell like fish. I would be a Salty Dog. “I mean,” Sylvia said, “that when the engine dies and you start drifting, which will happen, because things like that do seem to happen to you, you will not survive two days. Your skin will fry, you will collapse from dehydration, and because you will be the most useless person on the boat, you will be regarded by the others as a potential food source.” I didn’t like the imagery here.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“In Kiribati, the unimane and unaine (old women) are considered the guardians of the culture, a state of affairs that sets it apart from the United States, where the final arbiter for all things cultural is the adolescent male, which explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of the World Wrestling Federation, gangsta rap, and Pamela Anderson.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“Fortunately, due to a terrible misunderstanding, I soon found myself working as a consultant to the World Bank. I am not exactly sure what it was that led the World Bank to believe I had any expertise in infrastructure finance. I had never even balanced a checkbook. I hadn’t even tried. There is not much reason to balance a checkbook when your checking account rarely tops the three-figure mark. And so, to the Third World countries who had the misfortune of working with me on their infrastructure projects, I wish to apologize.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“Look for a wave shaped like an A.

An A.

Hmm.

I saw Zs and H's and Vs. I saw the Hindi alphabet and the Thai alphabet. I saw Arabic script. I saw no As.

Finally I gave up, and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to be a poor move.

There is a moment, shortly after one accepts the imminence of one's demise, when it occurs that you could be elsewhere: that if you simply left the house a little later, or lingered over a Mai Tai, you would not be here now confronting your mortality. This moment occurred just as I encountered a very large (from my perspective), rare and surprising wave. A wave that was pitching and howling, and it really had no business being where it was - underneath me.

The demon wave picked me up, and after that I have only a a vague recollection of spinning limbs, a weaponized surf board, and chaotic white water, churning together over a reef.

I decided surfing was not for me. I generally no longer engage in adrenaline rush activities that carry with them a strong likely hood of life-altering injury. (p. 138)
”
― J. Maarten Troost , The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“When it comes to naming things, vanity and flattery are dull motivations best suited for deciding on a child’s middle name. Much more interesting are the descriptive names that suggest a story or happening of interest.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“What about sharks?" I asked. It is one thing to encounter a shark on a reef, where there are so many other tasty nibbles to choose from, but it is another thing altogether to meet a shark in the Open Water, where you are more likely to be treated as an unexpected meal.

"Yes, I saw sharks, but I couldn't catch them.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“I too was very busy. Thinking. I had decided to write a novel. It would be a big book, Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism. Twenty years hence, the book would be the subject of graduate seminars and doctoral dissertations. The book would join the Canon of Literature. Students would speak reverentially of the text, my text, in hushed, wondrous tones. Magazine profiles would begin with The reclusive literary giant J. Maarten Troost . . . I had already decided to be enigmatic, a mystery. People would speak of Salinger, Pynchon, and Troost. I wondered if I could arrange my citizenship so that I would win both the Booker and the Pulitzer for the same book. To get in the right state of mind, I read big books—Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Ulysses by James Joyce (okay, I skimmed parts of that one). I read King Lear. Inexplicably, Sylvia thought I was procrastinating. And”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“If there is one indelible image from the Battle of Tarawa, it is a photo of dozens of dead Marines bobbing in the shallows just off what was called Red Beach II. I often launched my windsurfer from Red Beach II. Just twenty yards from the beach lies a rusting amtrac. At reef’s edge are the brown ribs of a ship long ago grounded, where Japanese snipers once picked off Marines wading and swimming and floating toward a beach that offered nothing better. A little farther I directed my board over the wings and fuselage of a B- 29 Liberator. Clearing the harbor entrance, I confronted the rusting carcasses of several landing vehicles. Near the beach was a Sherman tank, with children playing on the turret. The Battle of Tarawa is an inescapable part of daily life on the island.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“Life in Kiribati has a strong Darwinian cast to it, and men, except for one brief glorious moment, are pretty useless from an evolutionary perspective and can therefore be allowed to wither, whereas women are hardwired to survive. The “weaker sex” moniker may apply to the bench press, but Nature isn’t a gym rat.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“But the sea snake wasn’t slithering, it wasn’t even swimming, it just floated in the warm water, drifting contentedly, and I remembered that to be bitten by this, the most lethargic creature in the world, is to be guilty of being very, very stupid.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“[..] I learned there [in Mostar] that the distance between civilization and savagery is exceedingly small and this has scared me ever since.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“[..] I learned there [in Mostar] that the distance between civilization and savagery is exceedingly small and this has scared me ever since.”
― TROOST MAARTEN, La vie sexuelle des cannibales