The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through The Americas Quotes
"You can always tell a fugitive by his vagrant expression of smugness; he seems to have a secret in his mouth – he looks as if he is about to blow a bubble."
"For some, this was the train to Sullivan Square, or Milk Street, or at the very most Orient Heights; for me, it was the train to Patagonia."
"Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion."
"The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing."
"It was a morning of paralyzing frost, the perfect day to leave for South America."
"A travel book is the opposite, the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space."
"This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, ‘What I’d really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.’"
"The literature of travel has become measly, the standard opening that farcical nose-against-the-porthole view from the plane’s tilted fuselage."
"In the course of this narrative I shall try to avoid affecting Spanish words, and will translate all conversations into English."
"Each nationality had seemed to gravitate to its own special area of competence. This was economically-sound thinking; it followed to the letter the Theory of Comparative Advantage, outlined by the distinguished economist, David Ricardo (1772–1823)."
"I think we will have to spend the night here."
"He’s not my husband. He’s just a beautiful human being."
"I’ll come back. I’ll tell you when we are near Tapachula. Right?"
"I do not like the toilets. I don’t eat, so I don’t use the toilets."
"It is good to be hungry for a few days. People eat too much – especially these people."
"I had a Pepsi-Cola. But I will eat in Guatemala."
"Neither an explorer nor a hitch-hiker; no rucksack, no compass. Just a tidy little suitcase and small gold-rimmed glasses covered with dust."
"In a way, I admired his aloofness, though his aloofness was inspired by nothing more admirable than his egoism and his craving for the cheap."
"He nodded, he did not smile. And that was all. A chance meeting – nothing more. We merely brushed past each other at that far side of the world."
"Later, I decided that I would have been better off in a hotel in Tapachula, but at the time I was very eager to leave it."
"Civil war was almost immediate in the five countries: it was woodsman against townie, conservative against liberal, Indian against Spaniard, tenant farmer against landlord."
"The Guatemalans, sullen at the best of times, display a scolded resignation – bordering at times on guiltiness – when the subject of earthquakes is raised."
"There is no more hopeless object than a dead cactus; it does not collapse, but rather turns grey and hard and seems to petrify."
"I had not expected the people to be so dour or the trains to be in such a state of decay."
"From Guatemala to Argentina, the majority of the countries are run by self-serving tyrannies which are only making the merciless vengeance of anarchy inevitable."
"The announcement made his threat: the game would not resume until the ball was thrown back."
"The train’s noise was a loud hammering and clattering; it was hard to draw a breath and, more than anything, it was as if we were roaring through a small dirt tunnel fleeing a cave-in."
"But nightfall at sea is another matter. It is dark, as dark as it can be."
"A solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered."
"You have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you."
"It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people."
"What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest."
"It was as if I had burst through the bottom of my plans and was falling through darkness."
"This was not the time or the place to reflect on the futility of the trip."
"The things I want money can't buy. Money's just bullshit."
"As a traveller in this settled society I was an intruder, a stranger watching people go through familiar motions that I could not affect or enter into."
"I had no business here, but it was worse when I noticed how closely their lives resembled the one I had left at home."
"In time of crisis – sickness, collapse, the mortal wound – the Costa Rican would turn to the Church and demand a miracle."
"Death is one of the things you have to accept. It's nothing to be frightened of."
"The Canal itself is a marvel: into its making went all the energies of America, all her genius and all her deceits."
"Vagueness can become a habit, and travel a form of idleness."
"For them, bless their yellow pants and blue shoes, travel was part of growing old."
"The only thing to do in America is to emigrate."
"The only thing that mattered to the Zonian was the past; the present was what most Zonians objected to."
"It was the past that mattered to the Zonian; the present was what most Zonians objected to."
"I can hardly breathe, said a woman. What a smell!"
"It was too late to get off the train; we were moving away from the sunset, into darkness."
"These people are known as 'the happy people of Colombia'."
"The train was almost full, but at Cienaga, the first stop, a cry went up from the crowd waiting at the platform, and fights broke out as the people pushed into the cars."
"America is ungovernable. Those who serve the revolution plough the sea."
"If only there was something they could be given to help them."
"Wheels wouldn’t work on those mountain paths."
"As soon as an Indian puts on a pair of shoes he’s not an Indian anymore."
"His own novel, Huasipungo, is full of Indian folklore and locutions."
"It is the sales that matter. You have to be accepted."
"I hope when you come to Peru again it will be different."
"I’m surprised the Indians don’t strangle these people."
"The Indians were still on the bottom, and because they were mostly illiterate they could not vote."
"When he had a sexual relationship with a distinguished person, or one wearing a tie, he had a desire to strangle him."
"If you drive in some parts of Ecuador the Indians throw rocks at you."
"There are no poor people in Ecuador – there are only Indians."
"I recalled that tourniquets had been discredited."
"‘It is equal to living in a tragic land To live in a tragic time.'"
"The rest is hearsay: Paraguay was an unspeakable swamp, Colombia was full of thieves, and the Panamanians were so stupid and had such a tyrannical leader they didn’t deserve the canal."
"It is the raggedest traveller who has the most precise notion of the exchange rate."
"‘That’s interesting,’ he said, and thanked me."
"It must be terrible to be so far away from home on a nice Sunday afternoon like this."
"‘We are lucky to get through on this train,’ he said. ‘This is the first train in two weeks that’s made it past Volcano.’"
"It’s got good equipment – reclining chairs, lots of space and comfort. But look at the people! They’re in First Class and they spit on the floor, hang their clothes on the light fixtures, stick their feet up on the nice chairs."
"‘That’s the idea!’ he said. ‘It must be terrible to be so far away from home on a nice Sunday afternoon like this.’"