The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia Quotes
"Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink."
"Better to go first class than to arrive, or, as the English novelist Michael Frayn once rephrased McLuhan: ‘the journey is the goal’."
"Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night’s sleep, and strangers’ monologues framed like Russian short stories."
"The train was rumbling through Clapham. I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts."
"A small figure carrying paper parcels bound with string walked down the passage, his elbows thumping the corridor window. Duffill."
"The sky was old. Schoolboys in dark blue blazers, carrying cricket bats and school bags, their socks falling down, were smirking on the platform at Tonbridge."
"The train made its slow circuit of Paris, weaving among the dark buildings and shrieking frseeeeeeeefronnnng into the ears of sleeping women."
"I’m an actors’ agent,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my own firm in London. It’s a smallish firm, but we do all right."
"I heard Duffill climbing down the ladder, groaning on each rung. The dial moved sideways to the sink, and then the light came on."
"We were passing Dulwich College’s playing fields – children lazily exercising in neckties."
"That is England: the suburbs overlap the farms."
"I am forty-two years old and bald on my head and many wrinkles."
I wish I could agree with you,' I said. ‘But I read As If By Magic and I say to myself, "Now there’s a real agronomist!"
"We sped to the coast for the Channel crossing. But it was a false drama."
"The train was now moving fast. ‘Istanbul. Istanbul! Right you are.’"
"The Turkish conductor was in Venice, leaving Molesworth no ticket for Istanbul, or, for that matter, Yugoslavia."
"The marathon runner told me he had enough yogurt to see him to the Afghanistan border, where there would be more."
"The landscape was changeless and harsh: long strings of treeless hills lay at the horizon; before us was an arid plain, streaming with the fulvous dust the Lake Van Express had raised."
"The great express from Paris became a doubtful and irritating Turkish local once it got to Istanbul’s outskirts, stopping at every station simply to give conductors a chance to fool with notebooks in the Turkish Clapham Junctions and Scarsdales."
"To cheer me up still further, a small spotty-faced Australian girl from one of the third-class cars wandered by my couchette and asked if she could have a drink."
"I'd ask you to stay here, but the thing is, Linda, it's so small we'd be on top of each other in no time."
"My own ticket cost fifty dollars, which was ridiculously cheap for two thousand miles of travel in a private compartment."
"Dust does not hold the footprints of conquerors, and not even the bright name of Tamerlane makes this monotonous-looking town interesting."
"It is dusk, the serenest hour in Central Turkey."
"The successive conquests only robbed it of its features, leaving it nothing marvellous except a mosque that might have been built by the architect Sinan."
"At several halts children chased the train; they were blond and lively and might have been Swiss, except for their rags."
"I volunteered the information that the Turks at the next table had uncut melon."
"The people they follow me. Mister Sadik, take me to a nightclub."
"I buy them rubber mattresses, each person one mattress, blow them up so you don't have to sleep on the floor."
"Once you go to Mecca you have to make promises – no drinking, no swearing, no women, money to poor people."
"He was headed now for Australia, which he pronounced ‘Owstraalia’."
"The landscape repeated, becoming bigger, drier, emptier with repetition."
"The door to my compartment flew open as I was looking at this desolation."
"It was the saffron-faced man from next door with the large family."
"I hoped for his state of mind that it wouldn’t get any hotter. But it did, searing the air."
"He was worried, he said; cawing like a broker, and waving his bangled wrists despairingly."
"The Customs Office was closed for the night."
"The ferry moved off, hooting into the black lake."
"I chased the conductor from one deck to the other."
"We are almost at war with Afghanistan over the Pakhtoonistan issue."
"The Punjab Club was completely deserted."
"It was hopeless. I had walked about a hundred yards from the club and could not find the road."
"The lunatic resumed his singing. But now he had no listeners."
"The only bar in Lahore was the Polo Room in my hotel."
"I was being locked into a programme: lectures in Jaipur, Bombay, Calcutta, Colombo."
"The order in Lahore is in the architecture, the moghul and colonial splendour."
"If they began to practise it themselves, India will do well."
"I am about to be transferred from Simla."
"I used to live in Kensington Palace Gardens."
"I will give him one rupee if he says a prayer for me at the Mathura temple."
"It is sometimes thought that these sleepers in the Bombay streets are a recent phenomenon."
"I am not interested in excuses for delay; I am interested only in a thing done."
"We will," he said, with such certainty I challenged it.
"He said, 'I think these Japanese were going in twos and threes and having group sex.'"
"I was sitting in the good chair – the others were broken or had burst cushions."
"The train was Tamil; and they had moved in so completely, I felt like a stranger among residents."
"Starvation, which had turned the Indians into makers of the foolproof rubber-lugged sprocket and vendors of the fishmeal cutlet and vegetable chop, had made the Singhalese religious fanatics."
"It is truly remarkable how people of all faiths and communities continue to flock to this hallowed shrine."
"I have a good memory, I think. For example, I remember the day Queen Victoria died."
"My father was a soldier in the Indian Army. He had been a soldier his whole life."
"It doesn’t sound so much, does it? But, do you know, it only cost me ten rupees to live."
"But, do you know, it only cost me ten rupees to live – I saved the rest and later I bought a farm."
"A tiny particle of affection in India stands for passion."
"Every woman I saw after that was attractive, and I saw each one as a possible lay."
"Nothing happens in Burma, but then nothing is expected to happen."
"I was at the officers’ mess from nineteen twelve until nineteen forty-one, when the Japanese came."
"That was how the Japanese entered Maymyo."
"It was dull and cloudy, starting to mist, as we left Mandalay, and the old man next to me with a neat cloth bundle on his knees watched one of these bathing girls."
"Why not take the train back to Rangoon?" said the stationmaster.
"Opium is a restful drug, the perfect thing for geriatrics, but the chromatic snooze it induces corrects fatigue; after an evening of it the last thing you want to do is sleep again."
"The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture."
"Extensive travelling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind."
"Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of death and money."
"It was a city people were constantly fleeing, but here in the tombs the old ladies – retainers to kings of the twenties and thirties – never left."
"The irony being that even the most furious dove was afforded the unlimited credit and comfort on which he could preen his sensibilities into outrage."
"The Americans had been dressing and arming these men – these boys – with oversize uniforms."
"We can hardly blame a frightened draftee for not noticing this magnificence, we should have known all along that the French would not have colonized it, nor would the Americans have fought so long, if such ripeness did not invite the eye to take it."
"In a society that was basically an assembly plant for Western business interests, depending on the goodwill of washerwomen and the cowardice of students, this technology was useful for all sorts of programmes and campaigns."
"A place is approached, sampled, and given a mark."
"The further one traveled, the nakeder one got."
"The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness."
"Traveling over a long distance becomes, after three months, like tasting wine or picking at a global buffet."
"The odourless Japanese trains unnerved me and produced in me a sweaty tension I had always associated with plane travel."
"It is the sort of place that gives rise to the notion that the earth is flat."
"In the distance, the pattern was repeated on several hills, but there the furrows were filled with snow, giving the landscape the look of seersucker."
"The Russian passengers, who until then had sloped around the ship in old clothes and felt slippers, put on wrinkled suits and fur hats for the arrival."
"Any disturbance, anything less than perfect order, would send it sprawling."
"It was, an American assured me, an untypical occurrence: ‘What I mean is – no Japanese man ever tried to kiss me.’"
"The sight of the plushest, most comfortable room I had seen in thirty trains."
"Selling blood by the pint is just another example of your avarice."
"I was drunk enough to remember one of the Russian lessons Vladimir had given me."
"The difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows."
"Fiction is pure joy – how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction."
"I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it."
"For the survivors the future is melancholy, and the little train no longer runs between Hué and Danang."