Harini Mohan

“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“I never excelled academically, and took some pride in “not fulfilling my potential” in part because I was afraid that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn’t have much that much potential.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“A nation is not the soil. A nation is the people.”
― Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India