Ankit Sharma > Ankit's Quotes

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
― Neil Gaiman

“That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."

[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]”
― Salman Rushdie

“Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Amy, amante, amour, he whispered, as if the words themselves were smuts of ash rising and falling, as though the candle were the story of his life and she the flame. He lay down in his haphazard cot. After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding. Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page. But there was nothing—the final pages had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end. He would live in hell, because love is that also.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“How empty is the world when you lose the one you love”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Maybe he doesn’t really think it now. But sometimes things are said and they’re not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“And so he poured himself with renewed determination into her arms, into her conversations, into her fears and jokes and stories, hoping that this intimacy would finally smother all memory of Amy Mulvaney.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Watching his brother, Dorrigo Evans had wondered what it was that would make a grown man cry. Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage. Dorrigo Evans would live long enough to see all these changes. And he would remember a time when people were ashamed of crying. When they feared the weakness it bespoke. The trouble to which it led. He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“and how if she didn’t see him for another thirty years she would still love him, how she would still love him if he was dead until she was dead too.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“faith without doubt is addiction”
― Salman Rushdie

“If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none."

-- From "The Shelter of the World”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“What can't be cured must be endured.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”
― Salman Rushdie