Peter hessler Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Peter Hessler
Quotes of Author: Peter Hessler

Peter Hessler _ The Buried: An Archaeology of
For some reason, it had become a tradition for tourists to throw money into the hole in front of the Sphinx. Of all the strange things that foreigners and rich Egyptians did at the ancient sites, this ritual most impressed Sayyid and his family.
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Peter Hessler _ The Buried: An Archaeology of
Average Egyptians take pride in their pharaonic history, but there's also a disconnect, because the tradition of the Islamic past is stronger and more immediate. This is captured perfectly by the design of Egypt's currency. Every denomination follows the same pattern: On one side of a bill, words are in Arabic, and there's an image of some famous Egyptian mosque. The other side pairs English text with a pharaonic statue or monument. The implication is clear: the ancients belong to foreigners, and Islam belongs to us."
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Peter Hessler _ Country Driving: A Journey
Nevertheless, Chinese drivers haven't grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it's pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions - in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don't mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. But if you switch on your lights during a rainstorm, approaching drivers will invariably flash their brights in annoyance.
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Peter Hessler _ Country Driving: A Journey
In China, the transition has been to abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life - people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he's about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and they'll approach a roundabout in reverse direction if it seems faster. If they miss an exit on a highway, they simply pull onto the shoulder, shift into reverse, and get it right the second time. They curb-sneak in traffic jams, the same way Chinese people do in ticket lines. Tollbooths can be hazardous, because a history of long queues has conditioned people into quickly evaluation options and making snap decisions. When approaching a toll, drivers like to switch lanes at the last possible instant: it's common to see an accident right in front of a booth. Drivers rarely check their rearview mirrors. Windshield wipers are considered a distraction, and so are headlights.
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Peter Hessler _ Country Driving: A Journey
Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.
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Peter Hessler _ Country Driving: A Journey
In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the human eye from the moon. {In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and they sill can't.} For a while, Chinese intellectuals tried to resist such exaggerations, believing rightly that the foreigners had confused both history and geography. But eventually the myths proved appealing to nationalists like Mao Zedong, who used the Great Wall in propaganda, recognizing the symbolic value of a unified barrier. In any case, it was hard to set the record straight in a country with no academic tradition of studying the ancient structures. Finally it was as if the Chinese threw up their hands and accepted the foreign notion.
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Peter Hessler _ Country Driving: A Journey
The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.
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Peter Hessler _ Strange Stones: Dispatches
One challenge for a foreign correspondent is to figure out how much of yourself to include: If a story is too self-centered, it becomes a tourist's diary. These days, the general trend is to reduce the writer's presence, often to the point of invisibility. This is the standard approach of newspapers, and it's described as a way of maintaining focus and impartiality. But it can make the subject feel even more distant and foreign. When I wrote about people, I wanted to describe the ways we interacted, the things we shared and the things that separated us.
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Peter Hessler _ Strange Stones: Dispatches
But there were reports that Jiang and other members of the Old Guard were resisting retirement, and experts said that the Beidaihe meetings would be the first battleground of the political transition. Communist China had never had an orderly succession-for half a century, every transfer of power had involved coups or power struggles.
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Peter Hessler _ River Town: Two Years on the
I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the passivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren't concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn't really a community issue, because there wasn't a community as one would generally define it. There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland. And you could manipulate this fear and ignorance by telling people that the dam, even though it might destroy the river and the town, was of great importance to China.
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Peter Hessler _ Oracle Bones: A Journey
The words of history are also the words of war.
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Peter Hessler _ Country Driving: A Journey
In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother's responses were automatic-it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn't want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune.
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