175 quotes found
“To know India and her peoples, one has to know the monsoon. one has to know the monsoon. It is not enough to read about it in books, or see it on the cinema screen, or hear someone talk about it. I...”
“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle th...”
“Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage about what wed do,...”
“Srinagar is a medieval city dying in a modern war. It is empty streets, locked shops, angry soldiers and boys with stones. It is several thousand military bunkers, four golf courses, and three book...”
“In Indian social-cultural-political discourse there is a general tendency to ignore deeper, intellectual thought, and the sensationalist mass media has actually contributed to a great dumbing down ...”
“From the comfort of distance, [Non resident Indians and Kashmiris] financially and emotionally support ideologies whose consequence they dont have to face. They are not just a nuisance. As a collec...”
“Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, theres an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, though...”
“But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.”
“Internet is puberty of society.”
“How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who c...”
“How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out...”
“Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.”
“Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey.”
“All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each d...”
“Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal.”
“Ultimately, we will lose each otherto something. I would hope for grandcircumstancedeath or disaster.But it might not be that way at all.It might be that you walk outone morning after making loveto...”
“What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples neat and discrete and more like oatmeal. It's always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue ...”
“...if we were to associate the genius of a place with one particular thing the Russians with literature, say, or the Germans with music, the Dutch and Spanish with painting we would have to say t...”
“Sri Lanka is a beautiful little island nation parked perilously close to India; a little too hot, a little too humid, and perhaps too expensive, but to its credit are fantastic beaches, strangely m...”
“As a romantic ideal, turbulent, impoverished India could still weave its spell, and the key to it all - the colours, the moods, the scents, the subtle, mysterious light, the poetry, the heightened ...”
