Darshana Viswanathan > Darshana's Quotes

“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym

“People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Collective madness is called sanity ..”
― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

“Once upon a time, powerful wizard, who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go mad.

The following morning, the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone, which the magician had not managed to poison. The king was worried and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health. The policemen and the inspectors, however, had also drunk the poisoned water, and they thought the king’s decisions were absurd and resolved to take notice of them.

When the inhabitants of the kingdom heard these decrees, they became convinced that the king had gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. The marched on the castle and called for his abdication.

In despair the king prepared to step down from the throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: ‘Let us go and drink from the communal well. Then we will be the same as them.’

And that was what they did: The king and queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the king was displaying such ‘wisdom’, why not allow him to rule the country?

The country continued to live in peace, although its inhabitants behaved very differently from those of its neighbors. And the king was able to govern until the end of his days.”
― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

“Success is both an addiction and an enslavement...”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“Whenever he reads articles in newspapers or magazines written by politicians using global warming or the destruction of the environment for their electoral campaigns, he thinks:
How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was and always will be stronger than us. We can’t destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing.
Why don’t they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us? Because “Saving the planet” gives a sense of power, action and nobility. Whereas “not letting the planet destroy us” might lead us to feelings of despair and impotence, and to a realisation of just how very limited our capabilities are.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun, as Solomon said more than three thousand years ago.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“A seagull was flying over a beach, when it saw a mouse. It flew down and asked the mouse: “Where are your wings?” Each animal speaks its own language, and so the mouse didn’t under stand the question, but stared at the two strange, large things attached to the other creature’s body. “It must have some illness,” thought the mouse. The seagull noticed the mouse staring at its wings and thought: “Poor thing. It must have been attacked by monsters that left it deaf and took away its wings.” Feeling sorry for the mouse, the seagull picked it up in its beak and took it for a ride in the skies. “It’s probably homesick,” the seagull thought while they were flying. Then, very carefully, it deposited the mouse once more on the ground. For some months afterward, the mouse was sunk in gloom; it had known the heights and seen a vast and beautiful world. However, in time, it grew accustomed to being just a mouse again and came to believe that the miracle that had occurred in its life was nothing but a dream.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“Can't you ever be serious?' I said, mortified.
'It's difficult,' he said. 'There's so little in life that's worth it.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“Aren't we all pawns in the hands of time, the greatest player of them all?”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“You could also call it waking,' Krishna continues. 'Or intermission, as one scene in a play ends and the next hasn't yet begun.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“But truth, when it’s being lived, is less glamorous than our imaginings.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“How pride had kept them from admitting their mistakes—and”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you'll spend your life yearning for a man you can't have.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. ”
― George Orwell, 1984