The Book of Chocolate Saints Quotes

“The kitchen was the bivouac of an insurgent army. Every surface had been colonised
by objects that had nothing to do with cooking: a rotating globe, illustrations
ripped from anatomy textbooks, toy Ambassador taxis from
India, an obsolete desktop computer, a shelf of floppy disks, miscellaneous
handwritten missives stuffed into folders. Making a cup of
coffee was a philosophical manoeuvre. You had to take a position.
You had to ask yourself, what is coffee? Why is it consumed? How far
would I go for a cup?”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“Those who say time heals and death resolves are speaking falsely or thoughtlessly or without the experience of loss.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“The more he drank the nicer he became; wine revealed his charity.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“In certain ways the lives of the poets and the lives of the saints are similar: the solitary
travails, the epiphanic awakening and early actualisation, the thwarting
and the mercy, the small rewards, the false starts, the workaday miracles,
the joyous visions and fearful hallucinations, the flagellation of the
flesh and the lonely difficult deaths.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“If you want a moral, here it is: what god giveth, he taketh away. In this story art is god. And if god is art, then what is the devil? Bad art of course.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“If a nation does not care for its past it does not care for its future; and it if does not care for its poets it does not care for anything at all.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“You die. You get old and die. Your anger curdles, your grief dries,
your talent fades on the page. Your cells metastasise into an army
dedicated to the overthrow of you. You become dependent on paid
strangers for the maintenance of your blood and your brittle bones.
You understand that thought is the enemy, the source of all lesions,
tumours, and sarcomas; then thought becomes flesh becomes the
emblem of your shame.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“There’s been some discussion as to why God created the world.
Let me clear it up.
He made the world because that’s what he does. He makes things.
A more pertinent question, though pertinence is hardly the point at
this point: why did he make humans?
Now there’s a question.
He made us as a bulwark against loneliness and boredom. Too late
he discovered we were in fact the opposite. We augment boredom; we
deepen loneliness.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“In the sky was a sliver of moon. What kind of moon? A moon like a clipped fingernail, like a
smudge of powdered sugar, like a yellow laddoo, like a shattered dinner
plate, like the tusk of a wounded mammoth, like a scimitar buried in the enemy’s skull, like a horned demon drowned in blood, like a fallen
warrior’s silver visor, like the prow of a ghostly mothership, like the
smile of a giant black cat, like God’s half-closed night-time eye, a low
murder moon”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“Isn't violence a failure of the imagination, after all? And that failure, isn't it stupidity?”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“I've always liked the awkward young men and I'm no casteist, god no. I like boys, circumcised, uncircumcised, washed, unwashed, touchable, untouchable, straight, bent, curved, I mean, it's all love, isn't it, in the end?”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“Xavier said...[he] was making a list of dark-skinned saints to correct
the western historical record that acknowledged only fair saints
with blond hair and blue eyes. Many saints were dark-complexioned,
swarthy, or negroid, with unwashed hair and poor nutrition. Like Jesus.
He hoped to compile a book of chocolate saints, a directory in which
there would be no pale faces, only dark and darker, as a counterbalance
against the many books in the world that had no black or brown or yellow
faces….”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“God has it in for the poets, that's obvious, but the Bombaywallahs hold a special place in his dispensation.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints

“Near him were two men in hip-hop uniform, spotless footwear and
new baggy jeans and tilted Yankees caps. Shopping for blue jeans at
Macy’s, Dismas had discovered that hip-hop labels were as expensive
as, if not more expensive than some of the high-end names he coveted.
Functional clothing designed to absorb sweat and repel mud cost as
much as designer eveningwear. Phat Farm, Armani, same difference.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints