Place Quote: USA's cinema landscapes

The geography of movie America, the reason for all those celluloid dreams, rolled across the picture windows like a festival of film, freed from individual stories and script, but including all of them, making them necessary, inevitable. The genres had sped by. The industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh and Chicago, the railyards, the smoking factory chimneys, all spoke of fast urban tales of people doing their best and worst to make a living in the thundering black-and-white world.

• Jenny Diski, Stranger on a Train

Place Quote: USA & trains

It's all cargo - people, containers, pig iron - but there ain't no profit in people... Who's going to use the trains? Just old guys like us with no particular place to go and all the time in the world to go to it, and a few holiday-makers. It's a crying shame when you think of the history of the railroads. Hell, railroads made this country. Railroads forged a way east and west. Opened up the whole damn landmass. Now they just let the weeds grow if a route isn't profitable. People died in their hundreds, in their thousands, making the railroads, blasting their way through the mountains. They don't care.

• Jenny Diski, Stranger on a Train, p. 162-163

Place Quote: Gypsies & Communism

'Most Gypsies liked communism because it gave them houses, paid them to have children,' adds Henry, who grew up in East Germany. 'They don't see the faults in the communist system as we do. Censorship never affected them as they had no desire to read Western literature or talk of politics. And when the revolution came Gypsies were the first to lose their jobs in the factories'.

• Garth Cartwright, Princes amongst men, p.209

Place Quote: Yugoslav immigrants in New Zealand

Many Yugoslav immigrants shared my West Auckland suburb, relieved at escaping a nation that had known so much grief during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet they surely missed things - cafés, markets, farm smells, local humour, weary blues, old buildings, the ruins of history, messy everyday stuff that knits a community's soul. And the Gypsies. I bet, tucked up in their suburban comfort, hearing the sound of lawnmowers and sprinklers, radios and TVs, they missed the chatter and music and nuisance of the Gypsies.

• Garth Cartwright, Princes amongst men, p.146-147

Place Quote: Corruption in ex-communist countries

...the corruption continues. Maybe for people in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, life is better now communism has ended. But in Bulgaria, we have never had good government and life is so much more difficult. OK, we have more freedom and it's much easier to buy things. You used to have contacts to get certain things. But beyond that, everything is worse. Before, Sofia was a clean city. They had lots of people employed to keep the city clean. Now, well, someone has a contract to keep the city clean but the money vanishes rather than is spent on employing cleaners. And before you never worried if you could feed your children, what you would provide for dinner that night. Now, it can be so tough. Before, life was very easy. We used to take two holidays a year. One on the Black Sea and one in the mountains. Now we can't afford to take holidays.

• Garth Cartwright, Princes amongst men, p. 274-275

Place Quote: Syria

And here in Syria, the very place that had given the world this elegant script, half the people were still illiterate.

• Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules, p.439

Place Quote: Benidorm

Everything that Spain was said to stand for - charm, dignity, elegance, honour, restraint - was denied in the look of Benidorm.

• Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules, p.50

Place Quote: Benidorm

In full sunshine, it might have had a cheap and cheerful carnival atmosphere, but under grey skies it hovered, a grotesque malignancy, sad and horrible, that was somewhere between tragedy and farce.

• Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules, p.34-5

Place Quote: Mediterranean sea

And that was my first Mediterranean epiphany: the realisation that life on these shores bore little relation to what was happening five miles inland, no matter what the country.

• Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules, p.27

Place Quote: Madagascar - ban on foreign goods

All foreign goods have been banned, by President Didier Patsiraka, as part - his supporters say - of a harsh but wise campaign to force the Malagasy to become self-sufficient in manufactured goods.

• Dervla Murphy, Muddling through in Madagascar, p. 42

Place Quote: Madagascar non-drinkers

Madagascar is the only country I know where most nicely-brought up people do not drink alcohol because they do not want to.

• Dervla Murphy, Muddling through in Madagascar, p. 124

Place Quote: Australia's hidden racism

With Australia, it's always been a very devious kind of racism, it's always been well hidden. Whereas in South Africa, it's our there. It's in your face. It's blatant. The thing that's sold overseas - y'know, wonderful down-under country of sun, koalas and kangaroos... this land is drenched with blood.

• from Planet Ustinov, TV show

Place Quote: Cody - Buffalo Bill & Jackson Pollack

The people of Cody, in one of the more desperate commercial acts of this century, bought Buffalo Bill's birthplace and re-enacted it in their town. But they are lying through their teeth when they hint that he was a local. And the thing is, they have a talented native son of their own. Jackson Pollack, the artist, was born in Cody. But they don't make anything of that because, I suppose, Pollack was a complete wanker when it came to shooting buffalo.

• Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent, p.244

Place Quote: USA - Route 1

By the 1960s, Route 1 has become too congested to be practical - a third of all Americans live within twenty miles of it.

• Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent, p.139

Place Quote: American natural beauty

America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.

• Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent, p.86