Darshan

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying though the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Who's happy here? It's all sham and fakery," Nimmo said laconically, not bothering to look up from the magazine. "No one's happy here. It's not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don't mean you, but grown-ups like you--what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children's school admissions, husbands' beatings, wives' cheatings, Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war--outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can't.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Her voice was nearly gone, so, in order to hear her, Billy had to put his ear right next to her papery lips. She evidently had something very important to say.

"How...?" she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that she wouldn't have to say the rest of the sentence, that Billy would finish it for her.

But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. "How what, Mother?" he prompted.

She swallowed hard, shed some tears. The she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence:

"How did I get so old?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five