All the Lives We Never Lived Quotes

“Sometimes I take my glasses off to see differently from other people. Colours and words swim into each other, meanings change on the page. In the distance, everything becomes a pastel blur. There is a kind of restfulness in not seeing well that the clear-sighted will never know.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“As a child, I would place my back against one of our trees and feel its reassuring solidity, its immobility. It was not going to move, it would never go anywhere, it was rooted to its spot. For as long as they are alive, trees remain where they are. This is one of life's few certainties. The roots of trees go deep and take many directions, we cannot foresee their subterranean spread any more than we can predict how a child will grow. Beneath the earth, trees live their secret lives, at times going deeper into the ground than up into the sky, entwined below with other trees which appear in no way connected above the ground.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“I am of a temperament that needs the written word. For anything to have meaning, it has to be set down, it must live on paper before it is fully alive in my head. It has to be a series of words in a sequence in order to reveal a meaning and pattern.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to open mouth and remove all doubt”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Why not pause for an eternity where there is reason to pause? Why stay an extra minute when there is reason to leave?”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“It is wiser to be stupid and kind than to be clever and cold.

The way to live was to fill your mind and body with pleasurable things so that unpleasant things had no room in your life.

There is a merciful finitude in our capacity to sustain grief.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Nobody is oceans away from anything...The world is round and oceans meet...no place is safe from evil.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“It is wiser to be stupid and kind than to be clever and cold.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“When you have to leave your family & home it is not easy & nobody does it without a thought. If you have come so far, you are here to stay.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“I want him to think well of us – whatever “us” is meant to be.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“They think they know all there is to know and nobody can bring them anything new. They squeeze the joy out of life, dry it up, and chop it into a set of pellets they call rules. What is a good picture, what is a good book, what is the food you should eat – they know it all.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“If you wish to be happy for an hour, drink wine; if you wish to be happy for three days, get married. If you wish to be happy for eight days, kill your pig and eat it; but if you wish to be happy forever, become a gardener.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Everyone needs hobbies. Especially women, who are so bound up in the home.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“Arjun Chacha’s new radio had a big round dial which lit up by degrees, slowly going from dark to dim to bright, and voices came on a little later, as if people had to travel into it to speak.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

“The world thought it was an unbalanced thing to do, but anyone who is truly spiritual is both mad and selfish. So many great seekers have spurned family and children, left them bereft for years on end: was not the Buddha similarly guilty? And yet, would anyone say that it was a mistake for him to have left? How many millions over how many generations have been saved because he had the strength to sacrifice his family? My own misguided quest ended in failure of sorts: I learned at the feet of great masters, but my attention wandered. My back ached. My insect bites itched. In short I discovered I was human and pitiful and my physical needs were greater than my spiritual hunger. These are bitter things for me to confess but necessary: the first necessity in the quest for knowledge is truth.”
― Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived