Navraj

“A sweetly smiling Communist lady in Kerala worked hard in the rice fields all day and then came home to her much older husband, who sat on the veranda rolling beedis for money. "Since I got married," she said, still smiling, and well within her husband's earshot, "I have never had one day of joy.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Sometimes I think there are only two kinds of people in the world, Dad: those who read and those who don't. I don't know about other people, but I sort of found myself in books. Bit by bit, shade by shade, underlined sentence by underlined sentence, dog-ear by dog-ear, I began to see myself. Independently of everything and, at the same time, in relation to everything. I hope that makes sense. Yeah!”
― Mirza Waheed, Tell Her Everything

“The questions he knew how to answer were not about place or roots, but about love. Who do you love? What can you leave behind, and what do you need to hold on to? Where does your heart feel full?”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Inside us," Jose Saramago had written, "there is something that has no name. That something is what we are." The something that had no name within him always came to his rescue in the end. He clenched his teeth, shook his head to clear his thoughts, and ordered himself to get on with it.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir