Pragya Jain > Pragya's Quotes

“Think Thousand times before taking a decision But - After taking decison never turn back even if you get Thousand difficulties!!”
― Adolf Hitler

“We must never confuse elegance with snobbery”
― Yves Saint Laurent

“A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“He believed books had an aura that protected him, that without one beside him he would die. He happily slept without women. He never slept without a book.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“deaths could occur not merely in a war zone or during race riots but during the slow, unremarkable course of everyday life that made them so disturbing and so difficult to accept, as though the possibility of death was contained in even the most routine of actions, in even the ordinary, unnoticed moments of life.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“sense of having a destiny in that place he’d never actually lived, fantasizing about what it would be like to walk over the same land his forebears had, to help create out of near annihilation the possibility of some new and compelling future, as though living a life simplified in the way that only war can simplify he too would be able to find something worth surrendering to.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“some forms of violence could penetrate so deeply into the psyche that there was simply no question of fully recovering. Recovery was something that would take decades, which even then would be partial and ambiguous, and if he wanted to help in a meaningful way it would have to be in a way that was sustainable for him in the long term, without having to abandon all his needs for its sake.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“They wanted some kind of verdict on their disappeared sons, husbands, and brothers so they could finally have a measure of peace, one of the women was telling the reporter, so that they could conclusively learn what had happened to the people they loved. Rani had turned to him after the segment was over and told him, shaking her head, that she was grateful for having seen her dead sons’ bodies, for having managed to hold the younger one in her arms for a few seconds, that she didn’t know what she would have done had either of them suddenly gone missing one day, had she been forced to live in uncertainty about whether they were alive or dead. When you didn’t see and hold the body of a dead child you couldn’t understand that they were gone, she told him, and unlike her the relatives of people who’d gone missing were forced as a result to live their lives in a kind of suspended state,”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“We can direct our gazes toward what lies in the distance whenever we want, toward things that have nothing to do with us and lack the power to affect us, but usually we can hear only what is in our vicinity and has the potential to affect us, so that sound, unlike sight, was associated with the physical presence of a thing and the possibility of interaction with it. It was for this reason perhaps that ghosts and spirits and phantoms were so often depicted as silent presences in films and books, as beings we can glimpse but cannot hear, that can watch but cannot speak, as though to signify that while these beings are in some way present to us they cannot participate in our world, no longer have the power to act and affect us, just as we ourselves are present in some way to them but cannot engage in the world to which they have been cast.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“The specific path a life took was often decided in ways that were easy to discern, it was true, in the situation into which one was born, one’s race and gender and caste, in all the desires, aspirations, and narratives that one came thereafter to identify with, but people also carried deeper, more clandestine trajectories inside their bodies, their origins often unknown or accidental, their modes of operation invisible to the eye, trajectories which were sometimes strong enough to push people in certain directions despite everything that took place on the surface of their lives.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“the story of Kuttimani’s death told in the seventh chapter is based on Rajan Hoole’s account in The Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence, and Murder; the documentary described in chapter nine is Beate Arnestad and Morten Daae’s My Daughter the Terrorist; the account in chapter nine of Buddhist women’s poetry is based on a translation from the Pali by Charles Hallisey.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practise compassion. And do not gossip behind anyone's back - not even seemingly innocent remark! The words that come out of our mouth do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time. One man's pain will hurt us all. One man's joy will make everyone smile.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.
You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your throbbing vein. How can you say Shams is gone when he is everywhere and in everything?”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Never before had Descartes been in greater need of an update than in the twenty-first century. Over the last two decades, between first Nokia and then Apple, cogito ergo sum had surely been pushed aside by habeo a phone, ergo sum. But if ‘I have a phone, therefore I am’ were true, what of the phoneless?”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“The country came across like an upper-class spinster from a historical novel with impeccable manners who spent her days dabbing the edges of her mouth with a linen napkin while internally tutting at the uncouth dining etiquette of today’s upstarts, id est: the Chinese.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“OK, so more fascinating discoveries. This one thanks to Yujiro Hashi. There was a time when the Japanese equivalent for ‘the whole world’ was ‘the three countries.’ So, instead of saying ‘You are the most beautiful person in the whole world,’ they would have said, ‘You are the most beautiful person in the three countries,’ although the import would be the same. The fascinating part is that the three countries referred to are Japan itself, China and India. That was the whole world according to the Japanese mental map of the time. The phrase (now antiquated) is: san goku ichi no xxx, i.e. ‘the best xxx in the three countries (whole world). San goku ichi no hana-yom or the most beautiful bride in the world, is an expression still used at weddings.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“Unlike other methods of repair, like welding or glueing, kintsugi’s power was in its refusal to disguise the brokenness of an object, he said. It did not aim to make what was broken as good as new, but to use the cracks to transform the object into something different, and arguably even more valuable.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“Until moving to Japan, I’d tended to feel that if my interlocutor didn’t talk, she was expressing her boredom. But I was coming around to becoming cautiously appreciative of what, to a talkative Indian like me, was the ‘peculiar’ Japanese ease with silence.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“Suzuki concurred, positing that Japan’s particular character in intellectual life did not lie in ‘the richness of ideas, or brilliance in articulation’, but in staying ‘quietly content’, feeling ‘at home in the world’.35”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“It is a misfortune to be in the presence of a writer, even a failed writer, to be seen by him, be his passing study and remain in his corrupt memory. It is like the insult of a corpse on the road by a war photographer.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“Strong people write bad stories.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“It affects him, the great arrogance of the Equilateral Triangle, the failed aspiration of the octagon to be a circle, the eternal suffocation of the denominator that has to bear the weight of the unjust numerator, the loneliness of Pluto. And the smallness of Mercury, always a mere dot next to a yellow sun. In this world, there is no respect for Mercury.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness Of Other People

“That toilets in Japan were objets d’art has already been established. But their true awesomeness lay not in their gadgetry so much as in their cleanliness and easy availability. As a woman on the move, a decent toilet was manna. We had smaller bladders than men, we had monthly periods, and those of us who had given birth had urinary tracts that were as capricious in the timing of their needs as the annual blooming of the cherry blossoms. The simple fact of being able to use a toilet with confidence in public spaces – parks, metro stations, highway pit stops – enhanced the quality of life enough to make toilets my number one favourite thing about Japan.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“The lizard would eventually regrow a tail as if losing part of oneself is no great burden after all. If only we could be like the lizards.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“I could either abandon the doubts I beheld and be free, or else dwell in the eye of the prejudiced, to be chained there. There are too many enemies in life to be one of yourself.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty