Girish Gowda > Recent Status Updates

"Life tricked so shamelessly. A man could live, letting his senses have free rein, sucking his fill at the breasts of Eve, his mother - and then, though he might revel and enjoy, there was no protection against her transience, and so, like a toadstool in the woods, he shimmered today in the fairest colours, tomorrow rotted and fell to dust".

" The un-dodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose"

"He looked up at the pointed tips of pines, like spears, thrust at the leaden sky, his heart a little sad and afraid of the deep, still, freezing night around him, as though his own warm, living heart beat solitary, in a world of never-answering silence"

"Have you not heard that one of the shortest ways to sanctity may be a life of canal riot?"

"But Dorothea was strangely quiet - not immediately indignant, as she has been on a like occasion in Rome. And the cause lay deep. She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception; and now when she looked steadily at her husband's failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be along the track where duty became tenderness"

"Typhoid and swans- it all comes from the same place"

"But at the same time I knew that whatever people say and whatever they put up with and whatever they get away with, love should be simple"

"I want to feel that the world is hard enough to withstand knocks as well as to inflict them"

"Death too can be a woman, with a skull, misleadingly handsome. Death can menace the mother with the child, can invade the comfortable dwelling of the merchant, can interrupt the miser counting his gold or the scholar in his study; can waylay the bridegroom and his bride; can attend the wedding feast. Death, wearing crown, his bony feet on a globe, holds a glass inscribed with the words, The mirror that flatters not"

"I'd rather say something else. But of course, without the legitimacy of a flashy title at a blue-chip company, I wouldn't have a platform to say anything at all. Any value my words have in this country is derived from my association with its institutions: universities, banks, government. I can only repeat their words and hope to convey a kind of truth. Perhaps that's a poor justification for my own complicity"

Jesus wept. How overwritten is this novel.

"Catherine was slight but physically reckless; what drew boys to her often frightened them away. Nick, in his secret innocence, felt a certain respect for her experience with men; to have so many failures required a high rate of preliminary success"