Ashish Kumar > Ashish's Quotes

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  • #1
    Sebastian Barry
    “A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”
    Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

  • #2
    Sebastian Barry
    “Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.”
    Sebastian Barry, Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

  • #3
    Sebastian Barry
    “Empurpled rapturous hills I guess and the long day brushstroke by brushstroke enfeebling into darkness and then the fires blooming on the pitch plains. In the beautiful blue night there was plenty of visiting and the braves was proud and ready to offer a lonesome soldier a squaw for the duration of his passion. John Cole and me sought out a hollow away from prying eyes. Then with the ease of men who have rid themselves of worry we strolled among the Indian tents and heard the sleeping babies breathing and spied out the wondrous kind called by the Indians winkte or by white men berdache, braves dressed in the finery of squaws. John Cole gazes on them but he don’t like to let his eyes linger too long in case he gives offence. But he’s like the plough-horse that got the whins. All woken in a way I don’t see before. The berdache puts on men’s garb when he goes to war, this I know. Then war over it’s back to the bright dress. We move on and he’s just shaking like a cold child. Two soldiers walking under the bright nails of the stars. John Cole’s long face, long stride. The moonlight not able to flatter him because he was already beautiful.”
    Sebastian Barry, Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

  • #4
    W.B. Yeats
    “I have spread my dreams under your feet.
    Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
    W.B. Yeats

  • #5
    Andrew McMillan
    “the toilet is an intimacy
    only shared with parents when you are young
    and once again when they are older
    and with lovers when say on a Sunday
    morning stretching into the bathroom
    you wake to the sound of stream into bowl
    and go to hug the naked body
    stood with its back to you and kiss the neck
    and taste the whole of the night on there
    and smell the morning’s pale yellow loss
    and take the whole of him in your hand
    and feel the water moving through him
    and knowing that this is love the prone flesh
    what we expel from the body and what we let inside”
    Andrew McMillan, Physical

  • #6
    Andrew McMillan
    “Finally

    a day will come when
    woken by the xylophone
    of sunthroughblinds
    you’ll realise

    that the beach was not the place
    where horses tore the sand
    to ribbon

    that the scent of him has lifted
    from the last of the sheets
    that he isn’t coming back

    that it hasn’t rained
    but the birds are pretending that it has
    so they can sing”
    Andrew McMillan, Physical

  • #7
    Andrew McMillan
    “love
    is giving everything too easily
    then staying to try and claw it back”
    Andrew McMillan, Physical

  • #8
    Max Porter
    “Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.”
    Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

  • #9
    Warsan Shire
    “Sad people have the gift of time, while the world dizzies everyone else; they remain stagnant, their bodies refusing to follow pace with the universe. With these kind of people everything aches for too long, everything moves without rush, wounds are always wet.”
    Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

  • #10
    Warsan Shire
    “To my daughter I will say, when the men come, set yourself on fire.”
    Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

  • #11
    Warsan Shire
    “I want to make love, but my hair smells of war and running and running.”
    Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
    tags: love, war

  • #12
    Warsan Shire
    “I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing.”
    Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

  • #13
    Oscar Wilde
    “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
    Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  • #14
    Oscar Wilde
    “You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
    Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  • #15
    Oscar Wilde
    “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
    Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  • #16
    Jeet Thayil
    “Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts , and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender. An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency.”
    Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

  • #17
    Alice Oswald
    “A Short Story of Falling

    It is the story of the falling rain
    to turn into a leaf and fall again

    it is the secret of a summer shower
    to steal the light and hide it in a flower

    and every flower a tiny tributary
    that from the ground flows green and momentary

    is one of water's wishes and this tale
    hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail

    if only I a passerby could pass
    as clear as water through a plume of grass

    to find the sunlight hidden at the tip
    turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip

    then I might know like water how to balance
    the weight of hope against the light of patience

    water which is so raw so earthy-strong
    and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along

    drawn under gravity towards my tongue
    to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song

    which is the story of the falling rain
    that rises to the light and falls again”
    Alice Oswald, Falling Awake

  • #18
    Max Porter
    “I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.”
    Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

  • #19
    Max Porter
    “She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone. She”
    Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

  • #20
    Richard Scott
    “I am the homosexual you
    cannot be proud of”
    Richard Scott, Soho

  • #21
    Patricia Highsmith
    “I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
    Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

  • #22
    Patricia Highsmith
    “Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'

    'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.”
    Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

  • #23
    Patricia Highsmith
    “Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.”
    Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

  • #24
    Max Porter
    “Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project.”
    Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

  • #25
    Yrsa Daley-Ward
    “If I’m entirely honest, and you say I must be I want to stay with you all afternoon evening, night and tomorrow pressed into you so tightly that we don’t know whose belly made what sound, whose heart it is that is thumping like that until I don’t know if the sweat on my chest is yours or mine or ours.”
    Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone

  • #26
    Yrsa Daley-Ward
    “Just because you do it doesn’t mean you always will.”
    Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone

  • #27
    Yrsa Daley-Ward
    “Do not shout for silence. do not shout too loud there will always be birds outside a closed window”
    Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone

  • #28
    Yrsa Daley-Ward
    “No, it is just a big feeling. One of those crazy backed up against the wall feelings, where every position hurts.” He”
    Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone

  • #29
    “When he touches you like you are the last person he will ever touch. When he runs you through his fingers with every bit of tenderness he can flesh out of his bones. When he says your name like tidal waves and kisses you like a midnight in July. Hold him close, project your thanks to the heavens, and find what you’ve been waiting for in the closeness of your skin.”
    Key Ballah, Preparing My Daughter For Rain

  • #30
    “I pray that I can teach you that beauty is subjective;”
    Key Ballah, Preparing My Daughter For Rain



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