Quotes by Vikram Seth

“All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hands to left or right, And emptiness above— Know that you aren’t alone. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And ...”

“Imagining the flower-pot attacked itThe kitten flung the violets near and farAnd yet, who knows? This morning, as I backed it,My car was set upon by a parked car.”

“'You too will marry a boy I choose,' said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter. Lata avoided the maternal imperative by looking around the great lamp-lit garden of Prem Nivas. The wedding-...”

“[T]hink of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself.”

“In life's brief game to be a winnerA man must have...oh yes, aboveAll else, of course, someone to love.”

“They go to work, attend a meeting,Write an equation, have a beer,Hail colleagues with a cheerful greeting,Are conscientious, sane, sincere,Rational, able, and fastidious.Through hardened casings no...”

“Catholic and Episcopalian, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, We are all here; no one is alien Now radiation's common laws Impel us into common cause.”

“Workers of Lungless Labs—when dyingWill you be proud you were midwifeTo implements exemplifyingAssault against the heart of life?If you had scruples, you betrayed them.What pastoral response acquit...”

“Killing is dying. This equation Carries no mystical import. It is the literal truth. Our nation Has long believed war was a sport. Unoccupied, unbombed, undying, While 'over there' the shells were ...”

“Ten hostages is terrorism; A million, and it's strategy. To ban books is fanaticism; To threaten in totality All culture and all civilization, All humankind and all creation, This is a task of deco...”

“How ugly babies are! How heedless Of all else than their bulging selves—Like sumo wrestlers, plush with needlessKneadable flesh-like mutant elves,Plump and vindictively nocturnal,With lungs determi...”

“He writes with the omniscience and authority of a large, orderly committee of experts on Indian politics, law, medicine, crowd psychology, urban and rural social customs, dress, cuisine, horticultu...”

“Vikram Seth's book A Suitable Boy (1993) that made history as a publishing phenomenon heralded the change from an economist-poet to a full-time writer, making millions in pounds. The media dwelt on...”

“A Suitable Boy (which burlesques poetic pretensions) reads like the offspring of an unlikely mating of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, with its father's looks and mother's temperament.”

“In A Suitable Boy, Seth's traditionalism allows him to rediscover character. Mrs Rupa Mehra becomes too substantial, too vivid a presence to be confined within a novel: she is at once infuriating a...”

“Like Midnight's Children, however, A Suitable Boy too is steeped in an awareness of and affection for indigenous literary and cultural traditions, most notably Urdu poetry, Hindustani classical mus...”

“The diversity and range of Seth's work makes him somewhat of an enigma. However, for a writer who counts such diverse figures as Pushkin, T'ang dynasty Chinese poets, Chaucer, the Elizabethans, Ten...”

“In portraying a domestic life constrained, disrupted, and transformed by civil violence, Seth draws on the nineteenth-century historical novels of Scott, Alessandro Manzoni, Theodore Fontane, and L...”