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Bangkok wasn't dealing only in the clear-cut trade of bodies; it was trafficking also in the altogether murkier exchange of hearts. The East, as Singapore Airlines knows full well, has always been a marketplace for romance. But Thailand was dispensing it on a personal scale, and in heavy doses. It offered love in a duty-free zone: a context in which boy meets girl without having to worry about commitments, obligations, even identities. Love, that is, or something like it.

— Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage departures) (Page 301)

For the girl, her Western suitor might prove the mature and sophisticated companion she had always lacked; for the man, his Eastern consort could be the attentive, demure and sumptuously compliant goddess of his dreams.

— Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage departures) (Page 301)

One of the appeals of expatriation, I had always thought, was that it allowed one to treat real life as romantic; abroad, one could credit the lies one saw through at home.

— Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage departures) (Page 236)

The Great Wall, established to keep out the world at large, was now being used to attract it.

— Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage departures) (Page 114)

Those who want to leave will always find an excuse.

— Chinatown by Thuận (Page 65)

People warned me that life is thorny and my feet uncalloused.

— Chinatown by Thuận (Page 54)

Religion was a drug to some and and drugs were a religion to others. In Kathmandu some people lapsed into a narcotic haze and called it Buddhist serenity, while others had opiate dreams and called them visions. "Drugs" and "gurus," they told themselves, were almost anagrams; the high and the holy were virtual synonyms.

— Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage departures) (Page 83 - 84)

Innocence, I thought, could be its own protection; seeing no evil was halfway toward feeling no evil.

— Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage departures) (Page 51)

Only a special kind of person can remain for long in Paradise, making his peace with tranquility.

— Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage departures) (Page 51)

"mistakes can, in their way, be as revealing as epiphanies, and even a wrong impression may say as much about a place as a right one."

— Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage departures) (Page 28)

Every foreigner is a messenger from a world of dreams.

— Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer (Vintage departures) (Page 16)