A. > A.'s Quotes

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who remains.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’ said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Be selfish," he whispered. "Be brave.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“She was a goddess. She was a monster. She‘d nearly destroyed this country. And then she‘d given it one last, gasping chance to live.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“How strange,’ said Ramy. ‘To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.’

‘Not as odd as you’d think,’ said Victoire. ‘There are people, after all, and then there are things.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ...
It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“We are happy when people/things conform and unhappy when they don't. People and events don't disappoint us, our models of reality do. It is my model of reality that determines my happiness or disappointments.”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.”
― Stefan Zweig

“Srinagar hunches like a wild cat: lonely sentries, wretched in bunkers at the city’s bridges, far from their homes in the plains, licensed to kill . . . while the Jhelum flows under them, sometimes with a dismembered body. On Zero Bridge the jeeps rush by. The candles go out as travelers, unable to light up the velvet Void.
What is the blesséd word? Mandelstam gives no clue. One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office

“Someone speak to the God.
Someone turn the moon.
My country is in Muhurram.
And I have to call it an Eid.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“Everyone carries his address in pocket so that atleast his body will reach home.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“My memory is again in the way of your history”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“We mourn the martyrs of Karbala
our skins torn with chains.”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“My parents sleep like children in the dark
I am too far to hear them breathe”
― Agha Shahid Ali

“They make a desolation and call it peace.”
― Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“If you're happy in a dream, does that count?”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy

“Things can change in a day.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Some things come with their own punishments.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things