Anuradha Roy > Quotes

“The ocean exerts an inexorable pull over sea people wherever they are-in a bright-lit, inland city or the dead center of a desert-and when they feel the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge, straightaway calmed.”
― Anuradha Roy, The Folded Earth

“A veritable atlas. What rivers of desire, what mountains of ambition. Want, want, hope, hope, this is what your palm say, your palm is nothing but an atlas of impossible longings.”
― Anuradha Roy, An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“Sometimes I take my glasses off to see differently from other people. Colours and words swim into each other, meanings change on the page. In the distance, everything becomes a pastel blur. There is a kind of restfulness in not seeing well that the clear-sighted will never know.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Until humans came and made anthills out of these mountains, Diwan Sahib was saying, looking up at the langurs, the land had belonged to these monkeys, and to barking deer, nilgai, tiger, barasingha, leopards, jackals, the great horned owl, and even to cheetahs and lions. The archaeology of the wilderness consisted of these lost animals, not of ruined walls, terracotta amulets, and potsherds.”
― Anuradha Roy, The Folded Earth

“As a child, I would place my back against one of our trees and feel its reassuring solidity, its immobility. It was not going to move, it would never go anywhere, it was rooted to its spot. For as long as they are alive, trees remain where they are. This is one of life's few certainties. The roots of trees go deep and take many directions, we cannot foresee their subterranean spread any more than we can predict how a child will grow. Beneath the earth, trees live their secret lives, at times going deeper into the ground than up into the sky, entwined below with other trees which appear in no way connected above the ground.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“In winter, the air is clear enough to drink, and your eyes can travel many hundreds of miles until they reach the green of the near hills, the blue-gray beyond them, and then the snow peaks far away, which rise in the sky with the sun, and remain suspended there, higher than imaginable, changing color and shape through the day. Every hour, they come closer, their massive flanks clearly visible, plumes of cloud smoking from their tips. After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth.”
― Anuradha Roy, The Folded Earth

“These are secrets hidden from those who escape the Himalaya when it is at its bleakest: the mountains do not reveal themselves to people who come here merely to escape the heat of the plains. Through the summer they veil themselves in a haze. The peaks emerge for those devoted to them through the coldest of winters, the wettest of monsoons. The mountains, Diwan Sahib said in an uncharacteristic rush of sentimentality fueled by a few drinks at his fireplace, believe that love must be tested by adversity.”
― Anuradha Roy, The Folded Earth

“Don't you wish it could happen? Your mind wiped clean like a hard drive? Start again without memories?”
― Anuradha Roy, Sleeping on Jupiter

“I am of a temperament that needs the written word. For anything to have meaning, it has to be set down, it must live on paper before it is fully alive in my head. It has to be a series of words in a sequence in order to reveal a meaning and pattern.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“A veritable atlas. What rivers of desire, what mountains of ambition! Want, want, hope, hope. Your palm is nothing but an atlas of impossible longings. Nothing but longing.”
― Anuradha Roy, An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“Why not pause for an eternity where there is reason to pause? Why stay an extra minute when there is reason to leave?”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to open mouth and remove all doubt”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“The world thought it was an unbalanced thing to do, but anyone who is truly spiritual is both mad and selfish. So many great seekers have spurned family and children, left them bereft for years on end: was not the Buddha similarly guilty? And yet, would anyone say that it was a mistake for him to have left? How many millions over how many generations have been saved because he had the strength to sacrifice his family? My own misguided quest ended in failure of sorts: I learned at the feet of great masters, but my attention wandered. My back ached. My insect bites itched. In short I discovered I was human and pitiful and my physical needs were greater than my spiritual hunger. These are bitter things for me to confess but necessary: the first necessity in the quest for knowledge is truth.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Do you know the taste of betrayal? How would you know it? It's as if your clothes are full of sand, so full of sand that the grain bites you and pierce you and scratch you. You shake out your clothes, you wash them, you wash yourself, but even then, days later, years later, in the crevices of your toes, in the lining of the pockets, the grains pierce you. They're unbearable, those grains that don't go away whatever you do. You no longer know the real from the nightmare. Your heart, mind, mouth, everything is filled with sand.”
― Anuradha Roy, Sleeping on Jupiter

“Our closeness had dissolved long ago and each day was a quiet war over trivialities.”
― Anuradha Roy

“If you wish to be happy for an hour, drink wine; if you wish to be happy for three days, get married. If you wish to be happy for eight days, kill your pig and eat it; but if you wish to be happy forever, become a gardener.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Arjun Chacha’s new radio had a big round dial which lit up by degrees, slowly going from dark to dim to bright, and voices came on a little later, as if people had to travel into it to speak.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“How contradictoryI am, Lisa! These civil wars inside me are continuous and exhausting. One part of me fighting another with remorseless ferocity. I was still in love with hím - and yet
I wanted to be free of him. I did not love him, I have come to understand, I merely loved his addiction to me. I am not made for love. I want nobody. I need to be absolutely free. I am repelled by my indifference. I wish I were another kind of woman, a lovable one, not so cold and hard that I am hateful to myself. Maybe it is my own self-love that I saw in him and was disgusted by.”
― Anuradha Roy

“Don't you feel like disappearing from your life sometimes?”
― Anuradha Roy, Sleeping on Jupiter

“„Dragostea înseamnă speranță și distracție. Moartea e plictisitoare. Toți au parte de ea, de dragoste doar câțiva norocoși. N-am dreptate? Vreo treizeci de centimetri mai puțin pentru atacurile de cord, treizeci mai mult pentru ofurile inimii și peste douăsprezece luni trecem în revistă tirajul.”
― Anuradha Roy

“Have”
― Anuradha Roy, An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“Already too many snatches of other people’s lives were stored inside her, the built-up sediments from which bits and pieces floated up at times, into her dreams.”
― Anuradha Roy, Sleeping on Jupiter

“Getting better meant forgetting and forgetting meant losing him every day afresh, and this brought about a complicated, exhausting battle inside her between the need to remember and the need to forget.”
― Anuradha Roy, The Earthspinner

“Everyone needs hobbies. Especially women, who are so bound up in the home.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“It is wiser to be stupid and kind than to be clever and cold.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“When you have to leave your family & home it is not easy & nobody does it without a thought. If you have come so far, you are here to stay.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“…when she asked, I said I was very well, thank you. If I said more, it would be as futile as telling the story of a dream.”
― Anuradha Roy, The Earthspinner

“Nobody is oceans away from anything...The world is round and oceans meet...no place is safe from evil.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Cum să definești acest „ești mai bine“ atunci când ai pierdut pe cineva pe care l-ai iubit de la vârsta de zece ani, cu care ai făcut școala și facultatea, cu care te-ai căsătorit și cu care ți-ai clădit o viață? Să fie mai bine însemna să uite, și să uite însemna să-l piardă în fiecare zi, iar asta a adus cu sine o luptă complicată și istovitoare între nevoia de a-și aminti și nevoia de a uita.”
― Anuradha Roy

“I want him to think well of us – whatever “us” is meant to be.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived