Apratim Mukherjee > Apratim's Quotes

“Let the world change you and you can change the world”
― Ernesto "Che" Guevara

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“You have to store up books, becoming acquainted with human experience; let them lie around your thoughts, becoming yours—ring upon ring, as a tree grows, let them rise up from the depths like coral islands.

If it gets crowded with all the books and there's nowhere to put your bed, it's better to exchange it for a folding bed”
― Viktor Shklovsky

“One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.”
― PG Wodehouse

“... quite naturally, I am curious about behaviour which does not fit the natural patterns, which floats suspended at some unexplored level of the sentient sea and defies the tides and waves of society.”
― David Case, The Cell & Other Transmorphic Tales

“Crockery broke and fabric frayed. The delicate things I cared about perished, while the hard things like swords survived.”
― Sujata Massey, The Samurai's Daughter

“Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.”
― Lao Tzu

“I could not understand what these sixty-five thousand people lived for, what they read the gospel for, why they prayed, why they read books and magazines. What good had they gained from all that had been said and written hitherto if they were still possessed by the same spiritual darkness and hatred of liberty, as they were a hundred and three hundred years ago?
So these sixty-five thousand people have been reading and hearing of truth, of justice, of mercy, of freedom for generations, and yet from morning till night, till the day of their death, they are lying, and tormenting each other, and they fear liberty and hate it as a deadly foe.”
― Anton Chekhov, My Life

“Unreal friendship may turn to real
But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended”
― T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

“But what if I did tell people exactly what was going on? What if I valued my own peace of mind more than what other people think of me? Would I end up jobless, friendless, and loveless? Would I vanish entirely?”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.”
― Toni Morrison, God Help the Child

“The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“Success is far more perilous than failure, isn’t it? You’ve got to be doubly strong and watchful and wary.”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living

“Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“What I didn't like was how people talked to me
now that I was no longer single; they were nicer.

Men who never looked at me would start up a conversation,
like I was suddenly some safer form of fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”
― Shania Twain, From This Moment On

“I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
― Colette

“If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother, her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don't hold onto the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass kicking your mom gave you or the ass kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s ok. But after a while, the bruises fade and they fade for a reason. Because now, it’s time to get up to some shit again.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

- Love Song”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Now the moon is high; and the great house, needing habitation more than ever, is like a body without life. Now it is even awful, stealing through it, to think of the live people who have slept in the solitary bedrooms, to say nothing of the dead. Now is the time for shadow, when every corner is a cavern and every downward step a pit, when the stained glass is reflected in pale and faded hues upon the floors, when anything and everything can be made of the heavy staircase beams excepting their own proper shapes, when the armour has dull lights upon it not easily to be distinguished from stealthy movement, and when barred helmets are frightfully suggestive of heads inside. But of all the shadows in Chesney Wold, the shadow in the long drawing-room upon my Lady's picture is the first to come, the last to be disturbed. At this hour and by this light it changes into threatening hands raised up and menacing the handsome face with every breath that stirs.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“انتهينا مِن الحضرة ثم صلَّينا الفَجر، ومِلتُ برأسي في غرفتي واجتاحَني نورٌ شديد انفلتَ من طاقةٍ عالية ففتحتُ عينَيّ فلم أتبين الشعاعَ الأبيضَ الذي تدفق حِزَمَّا وراح يتشكل بأشكال مختلفة، مرة أشكال دائرية وأخرى أشكال مستطيلة وثالثة أشكال هرمية، فوجدتُ رجُلاً يرتدي جلباباً أبيضَ ويضع حول رقبتِه شاشاً أبيضَ انزلقَ مِن فوق شَعره الأسود الأملس الذي تتخلله خصلاتٌ فسفورية تزيد من وجهه بهاءً وتألقاً، وترتسم على وجهه أماراتُ المُلك والولاية والطمأنينة القريبة من اللون الأرجواني الممزوج باللون الفضي اللامع الذي يتحول حينما يتكلم إلى لونٍ ذهبي صاف، تقترب ملامح وجهِه من ملامحِ عمرَ بنِ عبد العزيز والظاهرِ بيبرس معًا”
― عبد السلام إبراهيم, عرش الديناري

“it is impossible for a man to achieve good through evil means.”
― Saint Nikodimos, The Philokalia: The Complete Text

“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody. ”
― Jane Austen

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
― Rumi, Masnavi i Man'avi, the spiritual couplets of Maula

“The greatest crime anybody can commit is to think that the weakness and the mistakes of others
give him the right to exist at their expense.”
― غسان كنفاني

“Prehistory isn't like a 'veil' or a 'curtain' that 'lifts’ to reveal the pre-set 'stage' of history. Rather, prehistory is an absence of something: an absence of writing. So a better image of the ‘dawn of history’ might be an AM radio in the pre-dawn hours: you recognize wisps of words or music across the dial, inter blending, and noise obscures even the few clear-channel stations. The first ones we find, when we switch on the radio of history about 3200B.C.E., come from Mesopotamia, and those from Egypt soon emerge. Eventually the neighbouring lands produce records, with the effect that the ancient Near East is probably the best documented civilization before the invention of printing.” (Daniels and Bright, page 19)”
― Peter T. Daniels, The World's Writing Systems

“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
― Yukio Mishima