Pradeep E > Pradeep's Quotes

“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less and suffer the less?”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Grief can have its own weightage. What is worse? The loss of a parent or one's own child?”
― Anita Nair, Lessons in Forgetting

“How can adults expect forgiveness of children?It is an adult emotion. It is not a child's natural instinct to make compromises on behalf of a parent.”
― Anita Nair, Lessons in Forgetting

“You think your parents are there just to love and irritate you. You see them as satellites spinning round your sun and you try to run away across the universe while they chase you.”
― Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs

“War was terrible and terrifying - blood, death, torture, blitz, camps. But if you watched the films they made, The Great Escape, The Bridge on the River Kwai, it seemed it was possible for war to be a chance for heroism and medal winning.”
― Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs

“But who can really remember pain? It's impossible, you don't remember it, you only fear it returning. These thoughts are like stitches - you see together a memory with them and the flesh heals over into a scar. The scar is the memory.”
― Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs

“But the truth is, there is no way to make cleaning sound sexy - unless you are cleaning a sports car, in a bikini.”
― Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer

“If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia”
― Thomas S. Szasz

“They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour of a person's skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Ravan & Eddie

“A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who's wholly alone occasionally talks to a pot plant, is she certifiable? I think that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It's not as though I'm expecting a reply. I'm fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it, a blinding fission of every emotion. The world is charged with significance, with meaning, and the world around you, normally so solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin, translucent.”
― Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir

“Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?"

"Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Morality was probably the invention of unattractive men. Whom else does it benefit really”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“Scientists want to search for alien signals because that's what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ."

"Jesus Christ?" Nambodri asked, with a faintly derogatory chuckle.

"Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine."

"I've heard that story."

"From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone's house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Bastard was a term of affection between us, as it usually is in the sub-continent between men who share a Catholic missionary-school education.”
― Tabish Khair, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

“Urbanity provides us with so many ways to avoid people. Isn't that what distinguishes it from traditional rural life, where the onus, perhaps because it was difficult & rare, was more on greeting people?”
― Tabish Khair, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position by Tabish Khair

“That the word pornography comes from the word 'prostitute' is unsurprising. It is a truth universally acknowledged that art, ideas or women that disrupt a stale moral universe must be in want of a comparison to prostitutes.”
― Richa Kaul Padte, Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography

“The idea of sex work weighs heavily upon our collective moral conscience, in particular because most sex workers are women. The idea that women can choose to have sex for a living unsettles many people's notions about how women should behave, and these include people who have the power to decide how cities, and by extension societies, are structured.”
― Richa Kaul Padte, Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography

“Throughout history, and across the world, women's chastity and virtue have been used as markers of national cultural worth.”
― Richa Kaul Padte, Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography

“The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“Love is so painful, how could you ever wish it on anybody? And love is so essential, how could you ever stand in its way?”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“It is hard to stop seeing your son as a son and to start seeing him as a human being.
It is hard to stop seeing your parents as parents and to start seeing them as human beings.
It's a two-sided transition, and very few people manage it gracefully.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don't want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren't equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap - if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It’s funny, but when I talk about this business of my father and Valentina with my women friends, they’re absolutely appalled. They see a vulnerable old man who’s being exploited. Yet all the men I talk to—without any exception, Mike” (I wag my finger) “they respond with these wry knowing smiles, these little admiring chuckles. Oh, what a lad he is. What an achievement, pulling this much younger bird. Best of luck to him. Let him have his bit of fun.”
“You must admit, it’s done him good.”
“I don’t admit anything.”
(It’s much less satisfying arguing with Mike than with Vera or Pappa. He’s always so irritatingly reasonable.)
“Are you sure you’re not just being a bit puritanical?”
“Of course I’m not!” (So what if I am?) “It’s because he’s my father—I just want him to be grown up.”
“He is being grown up, in his way.”
“No he’s not, he’s being a lad. An eighty-four-year-old lad. You’re all being lads together. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. What a great pair of knockers. For goodness’ sake!” My voice has risen to a shriek.
“But you can see it’s doing him good, this new relationship. It’s breathed new life into him. Just goes to show that you’re never too old for love.”
“You mean for sex.”
“Well, maybe that as well. Your Dad is just hoping to fulfil every man’s dream—to lie in the arms of a beautiful younger woman.”
“Every man’s dream?”
That night Mike and I sleep in separate beds.”
― Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian