"The idea is to generate paperwork. The word could hardly be more apt. Paper is work. Paper is the big employer. Someone fills out a form , someone files one copy, the other copy goes somewhere else to be filed by someone else, the third is retained by the customer for his records. The most insignificant transaction must be scrupulously recorded and logged, filed and stored, even, on occasion, retrieved. On a trip to Libya, p. 183."

“This book is a ripped, by no mean reliable map of some of the landscapes that make up a particular phase of my life. It’s about places where things happened or didn’t happen, places where I stayed and things that have stayed with me, places I’d wanted to see or places I passed through or just ended up. In a way they’re all the same place—the same landscape—because the person these things happened to was the same person who in turn is the sum of all things that happened or didn’t happen in these and other places. Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by that same token, all the things that didn’t happen didn’t happen there too. .”

“I was constantly surprised by how much people didn’t know. That’s one of the things about traveling, one of the things you learn: many people in the world, even educated ones, don’t know much, and it doesn’t actually matter at all. .”

“Once you turn forty...the whole world is water off a duck’s back. Once you turn forty you realize that life is there to be wasted. .”

“All we can do is keep applying the creosote, propping ourselves up with health and success, trying to keep the rain and the damp and the rot at bay for a little longer, trying to postpone the moment of complete collapse of abandonment for the same reason that one waits as long as possible for the alcoholic drink of the day: because the longer you leave it, the better it will feel. .”

“I felt I could no longer take the roller-coaster of emotions of travel, its surges of exaltation, its troughs of despondency, it’s large stretches of boredom and inconvenience .”

“The more you covet something, the more certain it is that you’ll lose it, and the more devastating the loss will be when it happens—which it will. .”