Anwar Khan > Anwar's Quotes

“Morality was probably the invention of unattractive men. Whom else does it benefit really”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“Refusal to accept the flow of the world is the root of all misery.”
― Devdutt Pattanaik, Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata

“What the person, who knows the truth, will speak, will not be understood by the person who does not know the truth.”
― Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik

“The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations.”
― Mae Jemison

“Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn't know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.”
― B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“I'm happy. Which often looks like crazy.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.”
― Thor Heyerdahl

“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Man is what he reads.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

“Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those--in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can’t escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists....”
― Joseph Brodsky

“...boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life--...the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. 'You are finite,' time tells you in a voice of boredom, 'and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.' As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays

“For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won’t violate one another’s privacies. This makes it a land of small talk. Two people greet each other happily, with friendliness, but might know each other for years before venturing basic questions about each other’s backgrounds....In the East, I’ve heard it said, there’s intimacy without friendship; in the West, there’s friendship without intimacy.”
― Karan Mahajan

“The best way to describe what he felt would be to say that first he was blind, then he could see everything. This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world that was 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“there was no such thing called truth. There was only the pursuit of truth and it was a pursuit that would always go on. It was a form of employment. ‘Everything that people do in this world is because they have nothing better to do,”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“Without the sense that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and that there are appropriate consequences to violating society's most basic values, the concepts of morality and right and wrong become meaningless. And then you have no society.”
― Mark Olshaker, Law & Disorder: The Legendary FBI Profiler's Relentless Pursuit of Justice