J. Maarten Troost

“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.”

“You can read and read, but nothing eclipses experience.”

“Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Few things are more enjoyable than lingering over the atlas and plotting a trip.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”