Jayan Parameswaran

“How can an entire nation endure so many long silences and so many unspoken words?”
― Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone- the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“It was around this time that I’d begun trying to perfect the art of fucking with people’s minds. I’d figured out that when someone else was hogging the limelight, you could cut him down to size by bringing up a subject he didn’t know anything about. If the other person knew a lot about literature, I’d talk about the Velvet Underground; if he knew a lot about rock, I’d talk about Messiaen; if he knew a lot about classical music, I’d talk about Roy Lichtenstein; if he knew a lot about pop art, I’d talk about Jean Genet; and so on. Do that in a small provincial city and you never lose an argument.”
― Ryū Murakami, 69

“This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae.”
― Erri De Luca, Tre cavalli