Navraj

“Grace to live at all—none of us did anything to deserve it. Being born. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. And to whom we might pay it.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“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

“He took refuge in work, just as he had at Rugby. The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work, Yeats said, and since the perfect life was plainly beyond him he had better look to the work instead.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir