“Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, "What a navigator I am!" And then the wind blows you east.”
― Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
― Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
“Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,-Wait and hope.”
― The Count of Monte Cristo
― The Count of Monte Cristo
“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”
― Lord of the Flies
― Lord of the Flies
“Everyone is Annawadi talks like this- oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich. It's vanity, nothing more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, "What a navigator I am!" And then the wind blows you east. -ABDUL'S FATHER, KARAM HUSAIN”
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“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
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