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Paul Theroux

Last updated:  23 December 1998


Is there a Japanese smile that does not seem like an expression of pain?
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 361

The Samoans remained hospitable as long as someone else paid their bills. They sat by the littered lagoon, cooling their bellies, and eating.
Samoa had become part of the American family and was content. Samoans were generally unenthusiastic, but similarly they were uncomplaining, and this little-brown-brother relationship would continue as long as America fed them and paid for their pleasures.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 359

It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 370

... the French are among the most self-serving, manipulative, trivial-minded, obnoxious, cynical, and corrupting nations on the face of the earth ... Polynesia is all profit for the French ... the patronizing racism inherent in French colonial policy ..
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 363

I could never tell for sure whether I was in America or Samoa.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 357

Except for bright little Port Vila in Vanuatu, no city or town in the whole of Oceania was pleasant. Islanders were not urbanized at all - they became antsy and deracinated in anything larger than a village, and without the means to be self-sufficient they generally made a mess of their towns.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 321

Pacific Christians were neither pacific nor Christian, nor were they particularly virtuous as a result of all their Bible thumping. Religion only made them more sententious and hypocritical, and it seemed the aim of most Samoan preachers to devise new ways for emptying people's pockets.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 321

It seemed to be one of the oldest Samoan customs to victimize the person without a family, the individual, the outsider, the stranger, because it was a society where, if you had no family, you had no status. Perhaps this was the reason they had achieved so little, either here or on the mainland. They did not want to stand out. They were the most pathetic conformists, and so the greatest bullies, in the Pacific.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 353

... Oceanic malaise. I never saw anyone reading anything more demanding than a comic book. I never heard any youth express an interest in science or art. No one even talked politics. It was all idleness, and whenever I asked someone a question, no matter how simple, no matter how well the person spoke English, there was always a long pause before I got a reply, and I found these Pacific pauses maddening.
And there was giggling but no humor - no wit. It was just foolery.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 341

Treat people like children and they become infantile and cranky.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 370

A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 446

An island was a place where everyone knew where everything was, and if you didn't you had no business there.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 433

But an island is much more than a principate. It is the ultimate refuge - a magic and unsinkable world.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 503

... a car in Honolulu is the badge of one's class. I think the car is the key thing. In such a hot city, where nearly everyone rich and poor dresses identically, clothes cannot possibly be a status symbol.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 476

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 426

The Germans kept to themselves and hogged the best seats, the most food, and with an instinct for invasion went up and down the ship, claiming the prime areas for themselves.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 390

The fact that few people go there is one of the most persuasive reasons for traveling to a place.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 383

Living on an island meant that you would never be alone.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 424

The French have left nothing enduring in the islands except a tradition of Hypocrisy and their various fantasies of history and high levels of radioactivity.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 409

... white Australians are Aborigines in different T-shirts ...
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 69

I could never keep a straight face when I heard one of these leathery diggers turn sententious over their drinking habits of Aborigines, for whom they themselves were the alcoholic role models.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 62

An island of traditional culture cannot be idyllic. It is, instead, completely itself: riddled with magic, superstition, myths, dangers, rivalries, and its old routines.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 150

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 97

... people who succeed in Australia - or who distinguish themselves in any way - can expect to be savagely attacked by envious fellow Australians.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 59

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 36

Tourists don't know where they've been, I thought. Travelers don't know where they're going.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 18

Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 54

They were like people who had only recently been domesticated, like youths in their late teens sitting among adults, rather upright and formal and wooden, because as soon as they loosen their grip or have one beer too many they slip into leering familiarity and all hell breakes loose.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 43

... the Pacific was a universe, not a simple ocean.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 151

Oceania was a wonderful place if you were healthy, but it was the worst place on earth if you felt sick.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 262

Loud laughter was the Fijian way of conveying the bad news that something was impossible.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 247

I liked hearing stories of Polynesian seasickness. It was like discovering people you had always regarded as cannibals to be vegetarians.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 275

They dropped things, they forgot things, they broke promises. The drove slowly - who else in the world did that?
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 274

It was farmed and deforested. In a word, it was possessed.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 241

I was all for foreign aid, but there was a certain type of aid that undermined people and made them dangerous.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 166

This building was so inappropriate it had to have been a result of foreign aid - one of those self-serving boondoggles in which a western country gives money in the form of a contract to one of its own builders to put up an expensive structure no one really needs.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 160

"But you're a politician", I said. "And you were a human being before you became a politician."
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 238

Missionaries and cannibals make perfect couples.
Theroux, Paul, The happy isles of Oceania. Paddling the Pacific. New York (G.P. Putnam's Son), 1992, 187


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