Lingaraj Sahoo

“American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won’t violate one another’s privacies. This makes it a land of small talk. Two people greet each other happily, with friendliness, but might know each other for years before venturing basic questions about each other’s backgrounds....In the East, I’ve heard it said, there’s intimacy without friendship; in the West, there’s friendship without intimacy.”
― Karan Mahajan

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
― Umberto Eco

“Some have argued that as language is the medium of knowledge, that which comes in the form of language constitutes a text; since language is interpreted by the individual, the reading by the individual gives meaning to the text; therefore each time a text is read by a different individual it acquires a fresh meaning. Taken to its logical conclusion, this denies any generally accepted meaning of a text and is implicitly a denial of attempts at historical representation or claims to relative objectivity, since the meaning would change with each reading. However, the prevalent views are more subtle.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“We are all hypocrites. We cannot see ourselves or judge ourselves the way we see and judge others.”
― José Emilio Pacheco, Battles in the Desert & Other Stories