Arun > Arun's Quotes

“God himself, sir, doesn't propose to judge man until the end of his days. (So why should you and I? ~ this latter part is added by Napoleon Hill)”
― Samuel Johnson

“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”
― Dr. Seuss

“…If one who slays one is a murderer then he who slays a thousand is not a hero,' said Lalu.”
― Mulk Raj Anand, Across the Black Waters

“Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.”
― Emmett F. Fields

“...People stop, stare. No one stop and stare if one of your own beggars drop dead in street. No just step over him like he is a stone, or a dog turd and go away quickly. But when they see a white man with golden hair lying on the street, everyone stop, everyone cry, "Hai - hai, - poor boy, call doctor, call ambulance. What has happen, Farrokh-bhai?"..."

- Farrokh said to Baumgartner when he wanted to get rid of the reluctant, overly drugged homeless foreigner out of his restaurant. (Page 167)”
― Anita Desai, Baumgartner's Bombay

“Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?”
― Arundhati Roy

“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It’s not about the burqa. It’s about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems.”
― Arundhati Roy

“The [Booker] prize was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class – they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.”
― Arundhati Roy أرونداتي روي

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy

“The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it. ”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
― Anita Desai

“some stories don't need telling”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“The good ones

who listen

to women

to children and the poor

die too soon,

their lives bedeviled

by opposition:

our hearts grieve for them.


This was the world my father knew.


A poor man

he saw good men come and mostly go;

leaving behind

the stranded and bereft.

People of hopes, dreams, and so much

hard work!

Yearning for a future
suddenly

foreclosed.


But today

you write me all is well

even though the admirable

Hugo Chavez

has died this afternoon.


Never again will we hear that voice

of reasoned anger

and disgust

of passionate vision

and of triumph.


This is true.


But what a lot he did in his 58 years!

You say.

What a mighty ruckus

Hugo Chavez made!


This is also true.


Thank you for reminding me.


That though life -

this never-ending loop -

has passed us by today

but carried off

in death

a hero

of the masses

it is his spirit

of fiercely outspoken

cariño

that is not lost.


That inheritance

has gone instantly

into the people

to whom he listened

and it is there

that we will expect it

to rise

as early as

tomorrow;

and there

that

we will encounter it

always

soon again.”
― Alice Walker

“In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“The person who fights monsters should make sure that in the process, he does not become a monster himself. Because when you stare down at an abyss, the abyss stares back at you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut”
― Albert Einstein

“There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

“A man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than the ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions
(...)
if one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is consolation - indeed, deep satisfaction - to be gained from his observation when looking back over one's life.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

“Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn't mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something.

#Page: 120”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

“How so much honourable is such a contest, in which one's moral conduct and achievement are brought as witnesses rather than the size of one's purse.

#Page: 10”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

“Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus