442 Quotes by Paul Theroux

I often had the feeling that it was the old immemorial Confucian family that had kept China orderly. Mao had attacked the family-the Cultural Revolution was intentionally an assault on the family system, when children were told to rat on their bourgeois parents. But that had faltered and failed. The family had endured

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.

The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown..

I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.

As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again.

I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes - better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to assure their continued prosperity.

Chinese blaming is always reserved for the higher-ups: underlings are always innocent. That was how they had been able to cope with the monstrous guilt in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.

He said that he believe that Nixon's visit to China had something to do with his release, because some of the people accompanying Nixon in 1972 showed an interest in political prisoners and had asked to visit prisons.'Usually, we got one thin slice of meat a week. If the wind was strong it blew away. But just before President Nixon's visit we started to get three pieces. The prison guards were afraid that he might visit and ask how we were being treated.

Here at Sudan the students humiliated their teachers,' she said. 'But in the high schools it was not unknown for students to beat their teachers to death.