Tanuj Solanki > Tanuj's Quotes

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
― V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

“To speak behind others' backs is the ventilator of the heart.”
― Marjane Satrapi, Embroideries

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Amulet

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The idea occurred to him when he was twenty. At first it was only a vague idea, a question looming — what should I do? — with an answer taking shape: nothing.”
― George Perec

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“With writing, we have second chances.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“There are two kind of men,' said Ka, in a didatic voice. 'The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girls eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -- and I am in this category -- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

“I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with:

"In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing....
Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I read like the flame reads the wood.”
― Alfred Döblin

“Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism. The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“One should read Borges more.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“World can be a bewildering place,and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious of traps”
― Rohinton Mistry, Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man