Shikha Dutta Gupta

“Most of the time when we think we're looking for death, we're really looking for love.”
― David Levithan, Another Day

“Epistemological insiderism” ... is the belief that identity qualifies or disqualifies one from writing with legitimacy and authority about a particular topic. ... Epistemological insiderism not only stakes out certain domains as belonging to persons with certain identities; it also risks boxing persons with those identities into specific domains. It risks conveying the patronizing and offensive expectation that members of racial and ethnic minorities will focus their scholarship on race and ethnicity.”
― Rogers Brubaker

“Your religion...serves you only for an excuse for your faults, but is no incentive to your virtue.”
― Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

“Relationship is a mirror in which I see myself as I am; but as most of us do not like what we are, we begin to discipline, either positively or negatively, what we perceive in the mirror of relationship.

“If you recognize the illusion then you can, by putting it aside, give your attention to the understanding of relationship. But if you seek security in relationship, it becomes an investment in comfort, in illusion—and the greatness of relationship is its very insecurity. By seeking security in relationship you are hindering its function, which brings its own peculiar actions and misfortunes.

When insecurity creeps into dependency, as it inevitably does, then that particular relationship is cast aside and a new one is taken on in the hope of finding lasting security; but there is no security in relationship, and dependency only breeds fear. Without understanding the process of security and fear, relationship becomes a binding hindrance, a way of ignorance. Then all existence is struggle and pain, and there is no way out of it save in right thinking, which comes through self-knowledge.

As long as the mind merely uses relationship for its own security, that relationship is bound to create confusion and antagonism. Is it possible to live in relationship without the idea of demand, of want, of gratification?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World