27 quotes found
“Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.”
“I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.”
“That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.”
“I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.”
“To use the past to justify the present is bad enoughbut its just as bad to use the present to justify the past.”
“People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.”
“Is it your implication that no good will come of this expedition?Oh it will, sir; theres no denying that. Captain Chillingworths words emerged very slowly, as if they had been pulled up from a deep...”
“How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on th...”
“Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.”
“I had a book in my hands to while away the time and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book - a compilation of pages that overlap without two ever being the same. People op...”
“Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.”
“She remembered a word he'd often used, karuna-one of the Buddha's words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness. A ti...”
“I don't remember much, which is a kind of mercy,I suppose. I see it in patterns.Sometimes it's like a scribble on a wall- no matter how many times you paint over it, a bit of it always comes throug...”
“This is my gift to you, this story that is also a song, these words that are a part of Fokir. Such flaws as there are in my rendition of it I do not regret, for perhaps they will prevent me from fa...”
“One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in onese...”
“If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?”
“In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, o...”
“Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.”
“It's something you don't see until it's gone-the shapes and things have and the ways in which the people around you mould the shapes.”
“He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they sa...”
