Navraj > Navraj's Quotes

“Perhaps only this: that the greatest danger in life is certainty. Yes, I do believe that. Our last redoubt in the world is wonder. Wonder and unknowing. Now and then a random detail will stir me to faint recognitions: a row of dead beetles in the grass; the chapped knees of some dowager on the S-bahn. Tantalizing signs reminding me that infinity billows out from every moment. That's when I lean in, sniff the air, cock my ears like a foxhound- and listen.”
― Cristina García, Here in Berlin

“What more do you need? Poetry? Poetry is in the living. Little Sister, in the dreaming. Nobody in the world can teach you that.”
― Cristina García, Here in Berlin

“And the fear is not to discover one day that the world has no meaning, but that, in fact, it does. Every decision counted. Against your better judgment, all of it mattered, the steps and choices, the pauses and delays. That’s the real fear: the answerable life.”
― Christopher Bollen, The Destroyers

“Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Krishna shrugged. "He believes it to be so. Isn’t that what truth is? The force of a person’s believing seeps into those around him—into the very earth and air and water—until there’s nothing else.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“A situation in itself,” he said, “is neither happy nor unhappy. It’s only your response to it that causes your sorrow.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“I heard the laments of the people of Hastinapur, their sorrow at losing us. But I no longer required their tears. It baffled me that as a younger women I'd thought that such a thing would make me happy.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions

“The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“...what experience had taught him- that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Turning to his right, Danny saw a great fig tree sparkle in many places inside its dark canopy of leaves, like a thing that knew its own heart.”
― Aravind Adiga, Amnesty

“Often he seemed to embrace the entire ethic of our trade without demur. After all, he declared to Walter, was not seeming the only kind of being? Oh my God, yes! Walter cried, delighted - and not only in our trade! And was not the whole of man's identity a cover? Barley insisted: and was not the only world worth living in the secret one? Walter assured him that it was, and advised him to take up permanent residence there before prices rose.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?”
― Ayn Rand

“You—she thought—whoever you are, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon, you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city and whose world I had wanted to build, it is my love for you that had kept me moving, my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face. Now I know that I shall never find you—that it is not to be reached or lived—but what is left of my life is still yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I’ll never learn, I will go on serving you, even though I’m never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won’t.… She had never accepted hopelessness, but she stood at the window and, addressed to the shape of a fogbound city, it was her self-dedication to unrequited love.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“There's nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he's denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs.”
― Ian McEwan, Saturday

“In fact, everyone he's passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.”
― Ian McEwan, Saturday

“You cannot reject a custom simply because it is vulnerable to abuse. That is like not going to church because there are so many hypocrites there. The important thing is that you understand the meaning of it and abide by it.”
― Maraire J. Nozpio, Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter

“Mama, what do you think it means to be an African woman? ... It is to be strong, Zenzele. It is to be at peace within. You must always listen to that inner voice and not permit others to drown it out. It is to measure your words; to balance your works with your gifts carefully; it is in some ways to be selfless, to serve others yet to know and defend your rights to the bitter end.”
― Maraire J. Nozpio, Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter

“Shiri, at the end of the day you will meet only two men in your life: One will make your hands tremble; the other will make them steady. The first will be your passion of youth, but like the blazing fires of the bush, it will soon die to glowing embers, then cool ashes. The second will enter your life quietly, like a thief in the night. He will be like the mighty trees in the forest that we do not see before us, yet they are there, strong and tall; in rain and sun, they dig their roots deep and shade us with their leaves. It is the second one who you must marry. He will be a good husband and father to your children.”
― Maraire J. Nozpio, Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter

“He insisted that the highest sort of reason is intuitive, not logical. Learning intuitively, we will immediately notice the deterministic necessity of the existence of all things. Everything that is necessary cannot be otherwise. When we realize this, we will experience great relief and purification. We will no longer be unsettled by the loss of our belongings, by the passage of time, by aging or death. In this way we will gain control over our affects and attain some peace of mind.
We must simply remember the primitive desire to judge what is good and what is bad, just as civilized man must remember primitive drives- revenge, greed, possessiveness. God, which is to say nature, is neither good nor bad; it's an ill used intellect that stains our emotions. Philip believed that all our knowledge of nature is in reality knowledge of God. This is what frees us from sorrow, the despair, the envy and anxiety that are our hell.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“No one reveals himself more completely to others than to himself - that is, if he reveals himself at all.”
― Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August: An Indian Story

“You feel even more naked and alone, he said silently, when you reveal yourself, a gratuitous act, for the strength and comfort you look for, any of those last illusions of consolations, can finally be only within you.”
― Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August: An Indian Story

“The Gita reminded him of the joker of Madna. "If thou wilt not fight thy battle battle of life because in selfishness thou art afraid of the battle, thy resolution is in vain: nature will compel thee. Because thou art in the bondage of Karma, of the forces of thine own past life.”
― Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August: An Indian Story

“The inhabitants of this world moved so much, ceaselessly and without sanity, and realized only with the last flicker of their reason that they had not lived. Endless movement, much like the uncaring sea, transfers to alien places, passages to distant shores, looking for luck, not sensing that heaven was in their minds.”
― Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August: An Indian Story

“That men at some time are masters of their fates was no longer merely a famous quotation. The idea haunted him, continually taunting him to confront it, but his mind responded only dully, in slow ineffective spasms. He did not know whether he should resign himself to his world, and to the rhythm that, living as we do, is imposed upon us, or whether he should believe in the mere words of an ancient Hindu poem, which held that action was better than inaction.”
― Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August: An Indian Story

“The secret to happiness is not to have any expectations from people.' 'I know that.' 'Especially from the people who matter most to you.”
― Manu Joseph

“That is the quality of drunkards, they have a lot of friends. Because what men find most endearing in other men are their tragic flaws.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“The secret to happiness is not to have any expectations from people. ... Especially from the people who matter the most to you.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“He realized in an instant that all the philosophers he had read, all the religions, even Einstein, even J. Krishnamurti, were saying the same thing in different ways - there is a shocking truth hiding behind the world that we see, behind the ordinary days of our lives. God is not a lie, but some kind of an abridged version of this reality, a beginner's course that has been misunderstood.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People