Rana Dasgupta > Quotes

“He was like the other half of myself,' says Boris...Ulrich says, 'You haven't lost {him}, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.
'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinons, or your hair has turned like his.
'There are no more facts about him -- that part is over. Now is the time for essential things...Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son.
'You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“You haven't lost Iraki, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.
'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinions, or your hair has turned like his.
'There are no more facts about him, that part is over. Now is the time for essential things. You'll see visions of him wherever you go. You'll see his eyes so moist, his intentions so blinding, you'll think he is more alive than you. You will look around and wonder if it was you who died.
'Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son.
'In the future, you'll live astride the line separating life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them. You'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.' ”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatized by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.

The man feels a great fraternity with those birds. He feels he carries, like them, a shredded inheritance, and he is too concussed to pass anything on.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand? ... So this is what Einstein meant when he looked me in the eye that day and said, I would be nothing without you. It was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“There is far more to us than what we live.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“In the future, you'll live astride the line separating life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them. You'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains the miracle of being.”
― Rana Dasgupta

“(Ulrich, 100 year old Bulgarian man): in Solo, by Rana Dasgupta
"Ulrich has sometimes wondered whether his life has been a failure. Once he would have looked at all this and said yes. But now he does not know what it means for a life to succeed or fail. How can a dog fail its life, or a tree? A life is just a quantity; and he can no more see failure in it than he can see failure in a pile of earth, or a bucket of water. Failure and success are foreign terms to such blind matter." (p. 160)”
― Rana Dasgupta

“no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come".”
― rana dasgupta, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

“They said, Now we are capitalists! but all Ulrich could see was criminality to a principle.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“Ties are straightened and expressions banished.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“As one unusually self-critical textile factory owner observed to me, reflecting on the system in which she played a nodal role, "There used to be a time when you could be a capitalist with personality. You could make your own decisions about what kind of ethos you wanted to create. Now it does not matter if you are a 'nice' person. It is completely irrelevant. We live in an age hen we all know what we do is disgusting but we still carry on doing it. The system we are part of feeds on desperation. And any system that demands such levels of desperation will produce more and more disorder, and the only way to keep everything in check will be the increasing militarisation of the world.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi by Rana Dasgupta (6-Mar-2014) Hardcover

“They go to Paris to learn how to make bombs and they come back having learned only how to write poetry, which they think is more explosive.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“Our saints have always been theives and murderers. That's the proof of the loftiness of their hearts. (spoken by Ulrich's neighbor)”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“You won't do this, my son! I won't have you waste your life. Musicians, artists, criminals, opium addicts ... You'll end up poor and disgraced. I won't have it!”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“When they brought in communism it was for the people, so they killed the people. Now they've brought in capitalism, which is for the rich, so they only kill the rich. This time you and I have nothing to worry about.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“Reality is never clear, said Boris. It's never final. You can always change it or see it a different way.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Solo

“But Delhi is a place where people generally assume – far more, say, than in Bangalore or Mumbai – that the world is programmed to deny them everything,”
― Rana Dasgupta, Capital

“The British Empires conversion of the vast indigenous economy of North America into aristocratic property provides an illuminating paralell, in fact, for a company like Amazon, whose trillion dollar market capitalization is derived from the usurpation of a thriving pre existing system of shops, markets, libraries and the like. With their bundles of patents and global monopolies, twenty-first-centruy tech conglomerates have swelled to the scale of eighteenth century trading companies and with a speed quite foreign to the plodding first economy. But they are more than just businesses. Silicon Valley firms have a profound impact on world organization, and key players such as Peter Thiel creates of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, and cofounder of the surveillance company Palantir Technologies possess political power greater than most heads of state.

The old caveats apply once more. First, the second economy serves elites almost exclusively. Again fit is chiefly financialized, and building financial instruments remains the preserve of the rich. 84 percent of corporate stock is owned by the wealthiest 10 percent. But even this decile is largely denied access to the heart of the second economy. Some 80 percent of Facebook stock. worth over half a trillion dollars is owned by 25 individuals and institutions, though Mark Zuckerberg retains only 28 percent of the company, this includes a vital 60 percent of the Class B voting shares. Since Facebook is an entity comparable in scale to a nation state, and serves some of the same functions, this determination not to share political power is instructive. Valuations of such companies are inflated by their monopolistic nature and by the financial institutions that control them to the point of total departure form the first economy. This fall, during the most serious economic recession since the 1930s, the values of Tesla, Amazon and Facebook all hit record stock-market highs”
― Rana Dasgupta

“The amount of good and bad in the world always remains the same. It neither increases nor decreases, it only changes hands.”
― Rana Dasgupta, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi