J. Maarten Troost > Quotes

“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, Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

“Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“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

“No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish."

"Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“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, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“for what is life, a good life, but the accumulation of small pleasures?”
― J. Maarten Troost, Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

“...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, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“Nevertheless, while I may not have completely understood what Holy Communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism. Eating the flesh of another human being, I understood, might not always be a really, really bad thing to do. If you were a good Catholic, you had some every Sunday.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

“Don't get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria's finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“The longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself swept away in a lagoonside maneaba rumbling to the frenzied singing and dancing of hundreds of rapturous islanders. And there are the crushing lows, when you succumb to a listless depression, brought about by the unyielding heat, sporadic sickness, pitiless isolation, food shortages, and the realization that so much of what ails Tarawa, the overpopulation and all its attendant health and social problems, need not be as bad as it is.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“i'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

“I had, of course, witnessed hundreds of people in a casino before, mindlessly dropping coins into slot machines. They don't play for money in America. It's true. The big payout is incidental to most gamblers. It's the numbness they're after. Not so in China. No one had that look of glazed stupor often found in American casinos.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“Stevenson, though, Was soon enough reduced to the timeless lamentations of the I-Matang on an atoll: "I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips," he wrote in a letter. And elsewhere: "I had learned to welcome shark's fresh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or beefsteak, had long had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“The I-Kiribati are a remarkably musical people. Everyone sings. There is something arresting about seeing a tough-looking teenage boy suddenly put a flower behind his ear and begin to croon.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“In Kiribati, the unimane and unaine (old women) are considered the guardians of the culture, a state of affairs that sets it apart from the United States, where the final arbiter for all things cultural is the adolescent male, which explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of the World Wrestling Federation, gangsta rap, and Pamela Anderson.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“When it comes to naming things, vanity and flattery are dull motivations best suited for deciding on a child’s middle name. Much more interesting are the descriptive names that suggest a story or happening of interest.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“I made arrangements with Bitaki, a teammate on the soccer team I played with, to go fishing with his brothers, who typically worked the waters off Maiana, the nearest island south of Tarawa. When I mentioned to Sylvia that I was going, she said: “No, you’re not.” “And what do you mean by ‘No, you’re not’?” I determined right then that I would go out fishing every week. No, every day. I would become a professional fisherman. I would become sun-browned and sea-weathered. I would smell like fish. I would be a Salty Dog. “I mean,” Sylvia said, “that when the engine dies and you start drifting, which will happen, because things like that do seem to happen to you, you will not survive two days. Your skin will fry, you will collapse from dehydration, and because you will be the most useless person on the boat, you will be regarded by the others as a potential food source.” I didn’t like the imagery here.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“Christopher Hitchens once said that he drinks “because it makes other people less boring.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story

“But, as I delved into Chinese for Dummies, I couldn’t help but conclude that the Chinese language is the Great Wall of languages, a clever linguistic barrier erected to keep outsiders out. What, frankly, is wrong with Esperanto? Or alphabets? What is so deficient about an alphabet that uses a judicious twenty-six letters? We can make lots of words with those twenty-six letters, big words even.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“Look for a wave shaped like an A.

An A.

Hmm.

I saw Zs and H's and Vs. I saw the Hindi alphabet and the Thai alphabet. I saw Arabic script. I saw no As.

Finally I gave up, and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to be a poor move.

There is a moment, shortly after one accepts the imminence of one's demise, when it occurs that you could be elsewhere: that if you simply left the house a little later, or lingered over a Mai Tai, you would not be here now confronting your mortality. This moment occurred just as I encountered a very large (from my perspective), rare and surprising wave. A wave that was pitching and howling, and it really had no business being where it was - underneath me.

The demon wave picked me up, and after that I have only a a vague recollection of spinning limbs, a weaponized surf board, and chaotic white water, churning together over a reef.

I decided surfing was not for me. I generally no longer engage in adrenaline rush activities that carry with them a strong likely hood of life-altering injury. (p. 138)
”
― J. Maarten Troost , The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

“Fortunately, due to a terrible misunderstanding, I soon found myself working as a consultant to the World Bank. I am not exactly sure what it was that led the World Bank to believe I had any expertise in infrastructure finance. I had never even balanced a checkbook. I hadn’t even tried. There is not much reason to balance a checkbook when your checking account rarely tops the three-figure mark. And so, to the Third World countries who had the misfortune of working with me on their infrastructure projects, I wish to apologize.”
― J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“On Washington’s Red Line, which may as well be called the White Line as it rumbles below the city’s palest quadrant, the atmosphere is discernibly different. It is all rustling of newspapers and ruffling of reports. It is sighing and harrumphing, little nonverbal gestures that say, all things being equal, they rather wish the entire world would fuck off. Washingtonians, it occurred to me, were not flip-flop people. I wondered how different America would be if the capital had been located in Key West. What if the nation’s motto had been Let’s get drunk and screw? Would the world be a better place?”
― J. Maarten Troost, Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

“the television news paused for a commercial--Coming up next: Are we all going to die Tomorrow?”
― J. Maarten Troost, Lost on Planet China

“They say that you can never go home again. You look for everything to be the same and when you find that things have changed, you are left reeling, crestfallen and dazed.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story

“Seriously. There were three of them, all roughly in their thirties, and they spent their time traveling the world, putting together documentaries about the earth’s wonders. The on-screen talent, I learned, did indeed write his own scripts, and came off as the Boss Man for the trio. He was the one with all the responsibilities—deciding on shots, dealing with the Home Office, periodically having to shave, etc. The camera guy did all the heavy lifting and was always one hernia or one dropped camera away from ruin. And the sound guy? He just stands there holding a lightweight microphone and a headset. Then ka-ching, paycheck, and he trots off to the Andes. It sounded ideal to me, a lazy traveler’s ideal profession. No thinking. No lifting of heavy objects. Just keep the mike out of the camera’s view and know what a woofer is. Easy-peasy. Then they asked me what I did.”
― J. Maarten Troost, Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story