The Girl Who Ate Books Quotes

“The past is an inheritance, and how it reaches you depends on many things—how conscientious your family is, the presence or absence of public libraries, what they teach in schools, whether you’re from a caste whose privileges include owning their history or from a caste low on the totem pole, deprived of its own history along with so much else.”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“But no literature grows in isolation, and looking at the history of Indian writing in English is like looking at a silent movie made up of static postcards of Delhi, or Mumbai, or any other thronged Indian city: the life, the colour, the hubbub of hundreds of eager new writers and high-minded editors, peacocking poets and fiery-eyed pamphleteers, all of that has been bled out of collective memory. In the same year that Dean Mahomet wrote his Travels, the Madras Hircarrah (1794) started up, joining Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780) and the India Gazette (1781); the first in a flood of periodicals and journals that would breathlessly, urgently take the news of India running along from one province to another. The”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“In Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s reworking of the noble savage theme, the tribes—freely exoticized—rise up against the British after a Slavery Act is passed in 1916. They are goaded into final action by the imprisonment of publishers, printers and the suppression of a free press. (Present-day governments might want to take note of Dutt’s assumption that the curbing of free expression would bring on rebellion faster than a Slavery Act, in his vision of India.)”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“I was staring at the end result. The Holy Grail of bookshelves, the ultimate shrine, the sanctum sanctorum, the point where every booklover and hoarder’s pilgrimage ends: an empty shelf. Two of them.”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“I look at the plaque, commemorating a man who stepped accidentally into history with his one published book, and I say: ‘But some day, I’ll write my own.’ And”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading

“Many people have a patchy, moth-eaten sense of how Indian writing in English developed: Dean Mahomet begat Raja Rao who begat Mulk Raj Anand, then there came G.V. Desani who begat Salman Rushdie, who begat Arundhati Roy and (each age gets the writers it deserves) so on, to the best-selling pulp fiction novelist Chetan Bhagat. But”
― Nilanjana Roy, The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading