Vipra

“Chris has never enjoyed jazz, never even quite worked out which bit he was supposed to be enjoying, but he does know that people who like jazz seem to enjoy life, and that he needs to pretend to enjoy life a bit more than he does. And what if it's the same as apples? What if pretending to enjoy life is the same as actually enjoying it?”
― Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice

“Thank you,’ says Mervyn. ‘She means a great deal to me. Been a long time since someone paid me any attention.’

‘Although I’ve baked you a lot of cakes in the last few weeks,’ says Joyce.

‘I know, I know,’ says Mervyn. ‘But I meant romantic attention.’

‘My mistake,’ says Joyce, and Ron drinks to stifle a laugh.”
― Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die

“At the heart of my approach to finding the skeletal structure of the Indus Valley languages is my belief that the features of the modern Extended Indus Valley Periphery languages that do not come from Sanskrit and the prakrits are likely to be calques, literal translations of structures that existed in languages that lived in the region before Sanskrit and the prakrits appeared.”
― Peggy Mohan, Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia

“What if pretending to enjoy life is the same as actually enjoying it?”
― Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice