25 Quotes by J. Maarten Troost

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.

Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.

Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.

One day, after I mistakenly added five garlic cloves to the pesto I'd prepared, rather than the one clove the recipe called for, Sylvia announced that the baby was kicking mightily, and what a strange and wondrous thing it is to put your hand on your wife's belly and feel your child moving like an agitated Mexican jumping bean.

I have been called many things in my life, but if there has been but one constant, one barb, one arrow flung my way time after time, it is the accusation that I am, in essence, nothing more than an escapist. Apparently this is bad, suspect, possibly even un-American.

It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

Few things are more enjoyable than lingering over the atlas and plotting a trip.

We don't think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms - Katrina, Sandy - are dismissed as once-in-a-century events.