Neer > Neer's Quotes

“…in the twentieth century
grief lasts at most a year.’

I have used this quote from the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet as a prelude to a small tale before I go on to the War in iraq. The reason I chose to use this quote is because I wonder how long grief lasts in the twenty-first century. Is it now a month? Two weeks? Or just enough time for the television cameras to record it and then it’s over? I don’t know.”
― Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother

“We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wood, it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there. You can see it lying around on objects close by.”
― Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums

“The gym instructor was the first to raise his hand. All the other hands flew up after his. While raising their hands, everybody looked at the raised hands of the others. If someone's own hand wasn't as high as the others', he would stretch his arms a little farther. People kept their hands up until their fingers grew tired and started to droop and their elbows began to feel heavy and pull downward. Everyone looked around, and since no one else's arm was lowered, they straightened their fingers again and extended their elbows. Sweat stains showed under the arms; shirts and blouses came untucked. Necks were stretched, ears turned red, lips parted and stayed half-open. Heads kept still, while eyes slid from side to side.”
― Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums

“They have good streets here, but everything's so spread out. I am not used to asphalt, it makes my feet hurt, and my brain. I get as tired here in a day as I do back home in a year.

That's not home, other people live there now, I wrote to Mother. Home is where you are now...

And Mother wrote back to me: How would you know where home is? The place where Toni the clockmaker tends the graves, that's home.”
― Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums

“...but with each step you take while fleeing, your baggage grows less and less, with more and more left behind, and sooner or later you just stop and sit there, and then all that is left of life is life itself, and everything else is lying in all the ditches beside all the roads in a land as enormous as the air, and surely here as well you can find those dandelions, these larks.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation

“Everything had kept getting less, they'd had to leave behind more and more baggage, or else it was taken from them, as though they were now too weak to carry all those things that are part of life, as though someone were trying to force them into old age by relieving them of all this.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation

“Which means that in the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation

“Nothing is nicer than diving with your eyes open. Diving down as far as the shimmering legs of your mother and father who have just come back from swimming and now are wading to shore through the shallow water. Nothing more fun than to tickle them and to hear, muffled by the water, how they shriek because they know it will make their child happy.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation

“Home! he'd cried out like a child that would give anything not to be seeing what it was seeing, but precisely in this one brief moment in which he hid his face in his hands, as it were, even the dutiful German official had known that home would never again be called Bavaria, the Baltic coast or Berlin, home had been transformed into a time that now lay behind him, Germany had been irrevocably transformed into something disembodied, a lost spirit that neither knew nor was forced to imagine all these horrific things. H-o-m-e. Which thou must leave ere long. After he had swum his way through a brief bout of despair, the German official had applied to retain his post. those others, though, the ones who had fled their homeland before they themselves could be transformed into monsters, were thrust into homelessness by the news that reached them from back home, not just for the years of their emigration but also, as seems clear to her now, for all eternity, regardless of whether or not they returned.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation

“It is not for you to say Hafiz
That the rose is one of God's creations
However heavenly it might smell
You have to think of the time
When you are both dead and gone
And people are interested only in your successors.”
― Hafiz

“It was a truth I had to accept, a truth that underscored that I had aged - one that brought with its attendant images of loneliness and irrelevance.”
― Bhaskar Ghose, The Teller of Tales

“A poem's what you think it is,' Arunava said and laughed. He held up his empty glass and said, 'Now that is very definitely not a poem, or it's a poem, but one of infinite loss and solitude, of what could have been and is not.'

'In other words, you want a refill,' I said and got him one.”
― Bhaskar Ghose, The Teller of Tales

“I mean, we live on a knife's edge, between the ordinary and whatever isn't - something terrible, something hilarious or very exciting, whatever. The difference is' - he held up a finger - 'just a fraction of a second.”
― Bhaskar Ghose, The Teller of Tales

“I had no idea that my world was about to change because of her. Thus it is that major, climactic moments come and pass unobtrusively.”
― Bhaskar Ghose, The Teller of Tales

“Something about these circuit houses,' he said. "They always seem to suggest the supernatural. Perhaps because they belong to another age and have just been left behind, almost by accident. They suggest hosts of staff, scurrying about, sahibs taking their ease, sola topis hanging from those hatstands over there, whisky and soda, steaming dishes of mutton and chicken on that large table - and look at the place now. Empty, deserted. As I said, left behind.”
― Bhaskar Ghose, The Teller of Tales

“What happens, Tapan,' Arunava had said, 'doesn't ever go away. Something remains, because it's always part of the whole place, the environment, everything. Memories are not just internal to us.”
― Bhaskar Ghose, The Teller of Tales

“But why this obsession with what's actually true, the real, all that? Can't you accept that our lives are always part fiction?”
― Bhaskar Ghose, The Teller of Tales

“Idealism, however impractical, gives a meaning to our existence.”
― Anirban Bose, Bombay Rains, Bombay Girls

“Never mind. Never mind. In this brief life, one cannot always be counting the cost.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains

“I do and always shall maintain that it is the privilege of the richer but less mentally endowed members of the community to contribute to the upkeep of people like myself.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains

“What is one ever doing anywhere?”
― Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains

“Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains

“History can never give us exact knowledge of what will happen in the future: rather, it shows us that our ability to prepare ourselves for change is limited.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“There’s always an end. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, in one way or another.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Poverty always looks the same, no matter where you come across it. The rich can always express their opulence by varying their lives. Different houses, clothes, cars. Or thoughts, dreams. But for the poor there is nothing but compulsory grayness, the only form of expression available to poverty.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Big changes don't happen at the battlefield; they are made in closed rooms where very powerful people decide in which direction things should go.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Memory is like glass. A person who has died is still visible, very close. But we can no longer contact each other. Death is mute; it excludes conversations, only allows silence.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“A life is a constant quest how to achieve the best result.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“Letters...People do not write the truth; they write the things that, they believe, you would like to read.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing

“There is a silence in empty houses that is unique... People have left and taken all the noise with them.”
― Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing