Manil Suri > Quotes

“What did religion do to people, to provoke such obstinancy, such hysteria - how did it push people to the stage of torturing themselves and killing each other? ”
― Manil Suri, The Death of Vishnu

“In mathematics, in place of characters, you have variables or unknowns. If I'm trying to plot a theorem, I try to imagine these variables interacting with each other. The boundary of their interaction is the theorem.”
― Manil Suri

“Endings need to be lived, they cannot be ordained.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“Perhaps this was the greatest genius of the cyber jihadis: the monopoly they clinched on information. They realized how helplessly addicted the population had become to knowing in this information age. So what if news was tainted or unreliable? - people needed their daily fix.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“This is the twenty-first century - you have to know what you want, then set upon it with everything you've got.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“Maybe it was the novels I read - the racier Mills & Boon romances of late, Danielle Steel instructing me on international sex and sin.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked - Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English).”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“...the difference between the tolerant and the extremist was not so great. "Looking into the Other, we can always find something of ourselves within.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“What will happen to the flowers, now that you are gone? The earth that clings to the steps, the tulsi that begins to sprout. The colors that brighten the darkness of the stairs, the scents that perfume the air. Must I climb alone the petal-strewn trail of your descent?”
― Manil Suri, The Death of Vishnu

“See those people holding hands?" he asked at the candlelight vigil outside the still-smoking Taj Hotel. "They're neither Hindus nor Muslims, but citizens of Bombay first.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“I made sure we fucked whenever the conversations got too emotional or too long - we weren't lesbians, after all.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“Samson had his Delilah, Adam his Eve, and the Jazter had you.
Already, I can see my epitaph. "Here lies Jaz, lover of his fellow men, done in royally by one of them.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“God knows nothing gets accomplished in the world these days without terrorism.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“The future, as always, felt too abstract to worry about, too nebulous, too otherworldly. What mattered was the here and now.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“Riyadh or Sharjah weren't exactly high on my list.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“Sarita's been so busy exercising her brain that she hasn't had time for her heart, the poor thing.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“Since the future's so iffy, I'll turn my attention to the past.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“You can scream you're Indian, you can disavow your religion, you can even be the next incarnation of Krishna for all your Hindu countrymen will care. Their HRM will pull down your pants and check your foreskin and slaughter you just the same.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“He lifted his head and let it thud several times to the floor. Maybe that would send Reason whimpering back into its cave.”
― Manil Suri, The Death of Vishnu

“They used Akbar's principles to formulate a version of Islam that could peacefully co-exist with other religions (or so they claimed). An Emperor's Bequest to Islam, their joint 1,300-page doorstopper, spent twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in hardcover alone. The fact that they remained practicing Muslims (albeit the liberal, wine-guzzling kind) put their message in high international demand.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“She had displayed a particular softness for religion, so he had tried to introduce her to the ideas, sometimes foreign, sometimes contradictory, that formed the essence of other faiths, to show her that these were all man-made inventions, and one could not be preferred over the other.”
― Manil Suri, The Death of Vishnu

“To think I need a gun to protect against those who'd kill me for being Muslim ... It's too bad they don't know about my true religion of noodling - a reason to get their nuts in a snit.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“It's the eternal tragedy of being gay in Bombay," I lamented. "Never a place to yourself." With city rents so high, most sons lived with their parents until marriage - and usually well after as well.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“What future did the Jazter see for himself, exactly? Would his days of shikar continue indefinitely, or did he dare look beyond the beaches and the train stations and the alleys? Could he, in some part buried deep within, secretly crave conventionality? (Or was that too much of a heresy?)”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“What are you now, Jaz Bond? Double-oh-Six, the chhakka secret agent?”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“Hadn't another wise man, the Buddha himself, warned about the evils of attachment?”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“Potom zamru svi zvuci, svjetla se zamrače, a njegove oči sklope, i njemu se učini kao da počinje neki film...”
― Manil Suri, The Death of Vishnu

“What, after all, did the word ‘faith’ connote, except a willing blindness to the lack of actual proof?”
― Manil Suri, The Death of Vishnu

“Wer rastet, rostet - what rests, rusts.”
― Manil Suri, The City of Devi

“existence a temporary delusion—hadn”
― Manil Suri, The Death of Vishnu