Afsal Najeeb > Afsal's Quotes

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“The truth is a bully we all pretend to like”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“every human heart beat is a universe of possibilities.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you're not a man.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Heroes only come in three kinds:dead, damaged or dubious.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators. His Ambassador is his chariot, his klaxon his sword. Weaving into the oncoming traffic, playing ‘chicken’ with the other taxis, Balvinder Singh is a Raja of the Road.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“The Tughluks have gone; Tughlukabad is a ruin; only Nizamuddin remains.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“the Kauravas and the Pandavas turned from demi-gods into cave men, the great war reduced to a tribal feud fought with sticks and stones.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan ... They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“What is now in the past was once in the future”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and — lest I forget — so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made they can be managed by mediocrities.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“In India, the sapling was planted by the nation’s founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be the road to the salvation of a soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“In 1951 Dec 20th, Nehru, while campaigning for the first democratic elections in India, took a short break to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. Although he believed democracy was the best form of governance, while speaking at the symposium he wondered loud...
the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda....He[the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din.
-Quoted from India After Gandhi, page 157.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“in the post-Gandhian war for power the first casualty is decency’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“If Jawaharlal Nehru was the Maker of Modern India, then perhaps Potti Sriramulu should be named its Mercator.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram