Koustav > Koustav's Quotes

“The government to you is what God is to agnostics--only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

“There was a time when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a closet and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defense against her parents' voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels would always find ways of trickling in under the door and thorugh the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the flood...The accumulated resentsmnets of their life were always phrased in the language, so that for her its sound had come to represent the music of unhappiness.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide

“How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide

“What would it be like if I had something to defend - a home, a country, a family - and I found myself attacked by these ghostly men, these trusting boys? How do you fight an enemy who fights with neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.”
― Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

“[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings --- the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [...] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.”
― José Saramago

“I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.”
― José Saramago, The Double

“Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.”
― Jose Saramago, Blindness

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“Questions, I've got some questions
I want to know you
But what if I could ask you only one thing
Only this one time, what would you tell me?
Well maybe you could give me a suggestion
So I could know you, what would you tell me?
Maybe you could tell me what to ask you
Because then I'd know you, what would you tell me
Please tell me that there's time
To make this work for all intents and purposes
And what are your intentions, will you try?
Impressions, you've made impressions
They're going nowhere
They're just going to wait here if you let them
Please don't let them
I want to know you
And if they're going to haunt me
Please collect them
Please just collect them
And now I'm begging
I'm begging you to ask me just one question
One simple question
Because then you'd know me
I'll tell you that there's time
To make this work for all intents and purposes
At least for my own
What is a heart worth if it's just left all alone?
Leave it long enough and watch it turn into stone
Why must we always be untrue?”
― Jack Johnson, Curious George: Jack Johnson and Friends - Guitar Recorded Version

“Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.”
― José Saramago, The Tale of the Unknown Island

“If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.”
― José Saramago

“In a matter of a moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave then the last, time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat, which, when you think about it, is not saying much, since the cheetah is the fastest of all the animals, and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say of another person He runs and jumps like a cheetah, perhaps because that first comparison comes from the magical late middle ages, when gentlemen went deer-hunting and no one had ever seen a cheetah running or even heard of its existence. Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.”
― Jose Saragamo, Seeing

“If, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much talked of immortality.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.”
― China Miéville

“It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.”
― Michael Crichton

“God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“No one escapes from life alive.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“Oh, my dear, if you only knew how strange is the matter regarding which I am here, it is you who would laugh. I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.”
― Jim Butcher, Changes

“Ultimately one has to pity these poor souls who know every secret about writing, directing, designing, producing, and acting but are stuck in those miserable day jobs writing reviews. Will somebody help them, please?”
― David Ives

“After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
― Anne Frank, Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex: A Collection of Her Short Stories, Fables, and Lesser-Known Writings

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan