Amitava Das

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean.”
― Toni Morrison

“I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“This is what life does for you in the end; it arranges a fight you can't win.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light