Prudence > Prudence's Quotes

“It wasn't what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows shaded it. No mists rolled over it. No birds circled it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily, her clear view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one small wish perhaps it would have been Not to Know, Not to know what each day had in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Ammu's tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him that raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she raged against.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Here they learned to Wait. To Watch. To think thoughts and not voice them.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“[b.] be prepared to be prepared.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy

“The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America. ”
― Arundhati Roy

“I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.”
― Arundhati Roy

“It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Anything's possible in Human Nature," Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. "Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."
Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.
Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.”
― Arundhati Roy

“On bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him, like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too made him cry out.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”
― Steven Pressfield

“...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it's for failure.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“I'm keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what's important first.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God you have found.”
― Thomas Merton

“We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.”
― Emily Dickinson

“And yet when I wish to explore how faith works, I usually sneak in by the back door of doubt, for I best learn about my own need for faith during its absence. God's invisibility guarantees I will experience times of doubt. Everyone dangles on a pendulum that swings from belief to unbelief, back to belief, and ends - where?”
― Philip Yancey

“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.”
― Blaise Pascal

“The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art