#bangkok

Lumpini Park at night: love at its cheapest, but the incidence of HIV is said to be over 60 per cent. In the darkness: furtive movement on benches and on the grass, muted moans and whispers, rustlings of large animals in heat, the intensity of the atomic fusion of sec and death (highly addictive, they say). ↗

— John Burdett

#bangkok #katoey #narration #death

I let one of the men rename me. A man gave me the name Rose – you didn’t know that, did you, Poke?…He said, this man, he said that Kwan was too hard to remember, even though it’s a good name and it means ‘spirit,’ and that the rose was the queen of flowers and I was the queen of Patpong.” She laughs, rough as a cough. “The queen of Patpong. A kingdom of whores and viruses. Death with a smile. ↗

— Timothy Hallinan

#edgar-award #poke-rafferty #thriller #death

I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant. ↗

— J. William Fulbright

#any #bangkok #completely #did #ever

Getting to places like Bangkok or Singapore was a hell of a sweat. But when you got there it was the back of beyond. It was just a series of small tin sheds. ↗

— David Attenborough

#bangkok #beyond #getting #got #hell

It's not like, I don't know, if Madonna has a new record out, then everybody from Bangkok to Birmingham knows what its called and can buy it the same week. But our stuff is not in that mass market. ↗

— Evan Parker

#birmingham #buy #called #everybody #i