Chitharanjan > Chitharanjan's Quotes

“People's voices never change, no more than the expressions in their eyes. Amid the generalised physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.”
― Michel Houellebecq, La carte et le territoire

“The Untouchables, in modern times, had won the useless right of being touched by the high caste, but they remained the poorest in the city.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“Thus narcissism is an obsession with “what this person, that event means to me.” This question about the personal relevance of other people and outside acts is posed so repetitively that a clear perception of those persons and events in themselves is obscured. This absorption in self, oddly enough, prevents gratification of self needs; it makes the person at the moment of attaining an end or connecting with another person feel that “this isn’t what I wanted.”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

“If nature represents a principle of economy, then culture surely must exemplify the principle of innovation through excess.”
― Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods

“What are you afraid of, mister, it won’t be so bad. You won’t die. Berlin’s a big place. Where thousands live, there’s room for one more.”
― Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

“The rise of the bourgeoisie” is a hackneyed phrase, so much so that one historian has been moved to comment that the only historical constant is that the middle classes are always everywhere rising.”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

“In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

“Reason is the slave of passion,”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“At first people had agreed to being cut off from the outside as they might have accepted any temporary irritation that would only interfere with a few of their habits. But, suddenly becoming conscious of a kind of incarceration beneath the lid of the sky in which summer was beginning to crackle, they felt in some vague way that this confinement threatened their whole lives, and, when evening came, the cool brought renewed energy and sometimes drove them to desperate actions.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Unpredictable humans. This is the stuff of story.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“Locked inside the black vault of our skulls, stuck forever in the solitude of our own hallucinated universe, story is a portal, a hallucination within the hallucination, the closest we’ll ever really come to escape.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“The drug dealers are all capitalists and criminals, selling rubbish at high prices. Marijuana and hash should be legalized and the rest should be prohibited.”
― Janwillem van de Wetering, Outsider in Amsterdam

“He looked at his cactus again, the enormous green phallus, the thorned phallus.”
― Janwillem van de Wetering, Outsider in Amsterdam

“Most of all, don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them. All they want is for you to sustain them in the good opinion that they have of themselves and provide them with the additional assurance that they take from your promise of sincerity.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“For the first time he conjured up a vivid picture of her personal life, her thoughts and her desires, but the idea that she could and should have her own private life was so alarming to him that he hastened to drive it away. This was the abyss he was afraid of peering into. Putting himself into the thoughts and feelings of another person was a mental activity alien to Alexey Alexandrovich. He regarded this mental activity as pernicious, dangerous daydreaming.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“it was so crucial for him in his humiliation to have this lofty height, however contrived, from which he, despised by everyone, could despise others, that he clung to his illusory salvation as if it was true salvation.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“the more time he spent doing nothing, the less time he had.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we’re scared, we run when we’re ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time. And when things look worst, we run the most.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Miscellaneous Writings

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. C. G. JUNG”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“One of the few positive side effects of a prison system is that, simply by providing us information of what happens, and how humans behave under extreme situations of deprivation, we can learn basic truths about what it means to be human.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“Almost all city-dwellers are daily participants in a complex part-song of voices, sometimes performing the aria but more often the chorus, the call and response, the passing back and forth of verbal small change with near and total strangers.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“They said a spectre was haunting Europe. 'Do you know what a spectre is?' the ideologues asked the beedi-rollers.
'We know, comrades,' Koomankavu's new proletarians replied. 'We have djinns and poothams here.'
'You are not listening, comrades.”
― O.V. Vijayan, Legends of Khasak

“Who had brought him this way? Whose was the unseen hand, the unseen leash?”
― O.V. Vijayan, Legends of Khasak

“How easy it is to tell the story of my life without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it's done. It's more complicated to recount what happened to her in those years. The belt slows down, accelerates, swerves abruptly, goes off the tracks. The suitcases fall off, fly open, their contents scatter here and there. Her things end up among mine: to accommodate them, I am compelled to return to the narrative concerning me (and that had come to me unobstructed), and expand phrases that now sound too concise.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“The past closer, more comparable, a way to justify present action.”
― Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

“It means something, I think, when Thai people learn how to cook Vietnamese noodles for Hong Kongborn teenagers, and as big a fan as I am of authenticity, it probably means something good.”
― Jonathan Gold, Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles