Monisha > Monisha's Quotes

“As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
a) Anything can happen to anyone.
and
b) It is best to be prepared.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“But then the fate of shy people is that all of their fears usually come true.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“It is an inevitability that masquerades as a decision. That is the way of a drunkard.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“But an idea that overrates human character is bound to fail. Look around, in every way of the world, only ideas that do not overrate human nature succeed.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. [...] Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don't get anywhere by not 'wasting' time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity

“Forgiveness, as it turns out, is not a linear prospect. Neither is healing; both flare up and die down. So do my symptoms of schizoaffective disorder. I have tried to control these "oscillations" as my psychiatrist calls them. But what, if anything, can truly be controlled?”
― Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

“Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“There’s something frightening about her, some huge emptiness in the pit of her being. It’s like waiting for a lift to arrive and when the doors open nothing is there, just the terrible dark emptiness of the elevator shaft, on and on forever. She’s missing some primal instinct, self-defence or self-preservation, which makes other human beings comprehensible. You lean in expecting resistance, and everything just falls away in front of you.”
― Salley Rooney

“Actually, her unexpected widowhood made Nettie safely pathetic and safely other. It was as though she had been trying, long before her husband died, to let my mother know that she was disenfranchised in a way Mama could never be, perched only temporarily on a landscape Mama was entrenched in, and when Rick obligingly got himself killed this deeper truth became apparent. My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced, and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“And of course a man who is much talked about is always very attractive. One feels there must be something in him, after all. I daresay it was foolish of me, but I fell in love with you, Ernest.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance Of Being Earnest

“This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“लिखते तो वह लोग हैं, जिनके अंदर कुछ दर्द है, अनुराग है, लगन है, विचार है। जिन्होंने धन और भोग-विलास को जीवन का लक्ष्य बना लिया, वह क्या लिखेंगे? क”
― Munshi Premchand, गोदान [Godan]

“For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire : A Plant'S-Eye View of the World

“After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“...what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow