Maarten Troost Quotes

#1. We don't think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms - Katrina, Sandy - are dismissed as once-in-a-century events.

J. Maarten Troost

#2. The gift of sobriety is clarity and a sense of connection - and travel only enhances that.

J. Maarten Troost

#3. I have been called many things in my life, but if there has been but one constant, one barb, one arrow flung my way time after time, it is the accusation that I am, in essence, nothing more than an escapist. Apparently this is bad, suspect, possibly even un-American.

J. Maarten Troost

#4. No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.

J. Maarten Troost

#5. It is an unfortunate reality for innate idlers that our modern world requires one to hold a job to maintain a sustainable existence. Idling, I find, if immensely underrated, even vilified by some who see inactivity as the gateway for the Evil One.

J. Maarten Troost

#6. All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves.

Terry Teachout

#7. In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.

Rory Stewart

#8. Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.

J. Maarten Troost

#9. The cure for too much to do is solitude and silence.

Ken Blanchard

#10. It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.

J. Maarten Troost

#11. Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.

J. Maarten Troost

#12. Paradise was always over there, a day's sail away. But it's a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

J. Maarten Troost

#13. I'm very Canadian. I want everyone to love me, and I just get nervous.

Tracy Spiridakos

#14. I wonder: instead of retreating and hiding, instead of pining for the way it was, what if I accept the way it is? This strikes me as both the most obvious thing in the world and the most profound.

Ann Kidd Taylor

#15. It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot.

J. Maarten Troost

#16. For what is life, a good life, but the accumulation of small pleasures?

J. Maarten Troost

#17. You can read and read, but nothing eclipses experience.

J. Maarten Troost

#18. Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord; they were born on the canvas ... it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them.

Georges Braque

#19. And come, blue deeps! magnificently strown With coloured clouds - large, light, and fugitive ...

David Gray

#20. I had grown accustomed to life being interesting and adventure ridden and, rather childishly, I refused to believe that this must necessarily come to an end and that the rest of my life should be a sort of penance for all the reckless, irresponsible, and immensely fun things I'd done before.

J. Maarten Troost

#21. One cannot toss ambassadors back like bad fish," said Eugenides. "You treat them with care, or you'll find you've committed an act of war.

Megan Whalen Turner

#22. Few things are more enjoyable than lingering over the atlas and plotting a trip.

J. Maarten Troost

#23. It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

J. Maarten Troost

#24. Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.

J. Maarten Troost

#25. I was simply restless, quite likely because of a dissatisfaction with the recent trajectory of my life, and if there is a better, more compelling reason for dropping everything and moving to the end of the world, I know not what it is.

J. Maarten Troost

#26. So you've decided to travel around the world. This is an excellent thing to do. It's a precious place, this planet. We should see it.

J. Maarten Troost

#27. I had read the book 1421 - The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies and become intrigued by his perspective on the era. Menzies, of course,

J. Maarten Troost

#28. If it's that jerk, he's going to see my gun. 'My body is a weapon.' Dumb sh*t. I bet my gun can take out his body really damn quick.

Lexi Blake

#29. I'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.

J. Maarten Troost

#30. There's a reason that there are oodles of young Aussies, Germans, Japanese, even Chinese backpackers traipsing around the world. They are unencumbered by debilitating student loans. No such luck for the American Theater Arts major with $120,000 in loans.

J. Maarten Troost