Gaurav Sagar > Recent Status Updates

One night, at about ten o'clock, I saw a certain man who came to my house. He told me that he was always hearing the word- "POOR", but he did not know it and he wanted to know it.

One day, the king of the "Wraith-Island" town chose all the people, spirits and terrible creatures of the Island to help him to clear his corn field which was about 2 miles square. Then one fine morning we gathered together and went to the corn field, and cleared it away, after that, we returned to the king and told him that we had cleared his corn field, he thanked us, and gave us food and drinks.

A quality of vulnerability, of wonder, which is as precious as it is rare. But that's how human beings are, he said, they will do everything to avoid pain, even the bravest of them. Yet we probably only find ourselves when we accept pain and doubt and uncertainity.

We need the artists who matter to remind us constantly that there are possibilities there, in the world and in ourselves, and the hard work and development of energy do have their rewards.

One can only do what one is driven to do, he said, the great betrayal is to try and do what you think you should do or what you think people expect of you or what you think will bring success.

My father was old, on edge. I felt I no longer had the right to go to university.

Although he was happy, he resented having to struggle for his livelihood. I've only got one pair of hands. Too busy even to take a leak. Walking, that's how I get rid of my flu. Etc. The daily chorus.

We read over what we have written. We tear it up. We start again. We read that over. We tear it up. We start again. And slowly it begins to find its rightful form. Slowly it starts to grow. When we die it is there, unfinished but nevertheless substantial, a substantial work. Everybody marvels. The patience, they say. The commitment. The dedication. And nobody knew. All done quietly, in the dark.

To be frank, he said, I am sometimes greatly relieved by the thought that soon I will be dead and no longer have to go on with this psychological juggling act, day after day, registering, taking in and not taking in, knowing and not knowing.

Writers are helpless before the human figure, he said, but they come into their own in response to cities. They are helpless before the human face.

The hardest thing is the words, how long it takes, he says, taking a sip of his drink, the concentration you need to work out what goes with what, how to put together a single sentence. I had no idea that shaping a sentence was so difficult, all the possible ways there are to do it, even the simplest sentence, as soon as it's written down, all the hesitations, all the problems.

The old town centre is no more than an asphalt chessboard, nothing but a sketch of the past. This is what hell must be: erasure. And down below, the fire rages on.

The most surprising thing about this Holy Land story is the desire to celebrate what they called revealed truth with clumsy copies and implausible and monstrously contorted recreations that John Greco and others passed off with their crude self-confidence as the real thing- that I can't understand, he said.

We went for a walk all together along a steeply falling street, pervaded by the scent of violets; uncertain whether it was the magic of the night which lay like silver on the snow or whether it was the light of dawn....

Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.

Don't bring anything with you that you can't replace- your life, for example- went the whispers in town.

I lack both the idea and the words, I have only the feeling.

Why are you still hanging around after all this, tormenting me by not leaving?

The devil only knows what habit can do to a person.

At times the thought flashed through my mind and pierced my heart with the most excruciating pain that ten, twenty, forty years might pass and I would still- even after forty years- recall with revolution and humiliation these nastiest, most ridiculous and ghastliest moments of my whole life.

This way of writing, which seems to bring me closer to the truth, relieves me of the dark, heavy burden of personal remembrance by establishing a more objective approach. And yet something deep down inside refuses to yield and wants me to remember my mother purely in emotional terms- affection or tears- without searching for an explanation.

I have hundreds of similar memories, but at times one of them stands out from the hundreds and weighs heavily on me. For some reasons I believe that by writing it down I shall rid myself of it. So why not try?

Of course, my jokes, gentlemen, are in bad taste, uneven, muddled, lacking in confidence. But don't you see- that's because I have no self-respect. Can any thinking have any kind of respect for himself?

Now, with people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for themselves in general, how is it done? Why, when they are possessed, let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for the time there is nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being.

Now, of all the lines in Moscow, the line that was the most elusive, the most daunting, the most insurmountable was the one that led to the Agency of Expatriate Affairs – that department in which one applied for an exit visa from Russia. Just finding the line was a challenge.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems. In Dostoievsky's novels the question is propounded with such intensity that it can only invite extreme solutions. Existence is illusionary and eternal.

The absurd, godless world is then peopled with men who think clearly and who have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.

Like a wood louse she had crawled insidiously towards them and maliciously found out about "the real thing," like a cat that licks its chops and closes its eyes before a pitcher of cream it has discovered.

There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.