Run and Hide Quotes

“and, perhaps, every man in some licentious depths of his being responds with – a sense of awe at modes of pleasure so casually obtained, at sex so cleanly sundered from sentiment.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Run and Hide: A Novel

“For previous generations, progress in life so far would have meant going through the motions prescribed by caste and class: together, the imperatives of education (inevitably vocational), marriage (nearly always arranged, with love regarded as a folly of callow youth), parenthood and professional career (with the government) imposed order, without too many troubling questions about their purpose and meaning. Regional and caste background dictated culinary and sartorial habits: kurta-pyjamas and saris or shalwar-kameezes at home, drab Western-style clothes outside; an unchanging menu of dal, vegetables, rotis and rice leavened in some households with non-alcoholic drinks (Aseem’s first publication in the IIT literary magazine was Neruda-style odes to Rooh Afza and Kissan’s orange squash, Complan, Ovaltine and Elaichi Horlicks). We belonged to a relatively daring generation whose members took on the responsibility of crafting their own lives: working in private jobs, marrying for love, eating pasta, pizza and chow mein as well as parathas, and drinking cola and beer, at home, taking beach vacations rather than going on pilgrimages, and wearing jeans and T-shirts rather than the safari suits that had come to denote style to the preceding generation of middle-class Indians. Our choices were expanded far beyond what my parents or Aseem’s could even imagine.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Run and Hide: A Novel

“We continue to inhabit private discontent and anxiety, no matter how overpowering the chaos of public life and how developed or underdeveloped our societies.

I didn't know then that this freedom from clutter and the careful arrangement of space and light rather than of objects, the artful bareness, were the surest manifestations of 21st century wealth and taste.

Social media forces everyone to become an operator; everyone is a hustler in the neo-liberal marketplace. We all have to learn how to blend aggressive self-promotion with sincere activism.

That useful upper-caste trait: an instant blindness in the face of potentially uncomfortable realities.

Coming from the Indian society rent by anarchic poverty and cruelty, where you could never fell history to be on your side, or any institution of government and law working in your favor, coming from a society that had frightened and traumatized so many of us for life, I was learning how to appreciate, or at least not be afraid of, a rich and steadfast world.

Geography-dissolving people with hyphenated identities.

The general public forgives the super-rich most things except their failure to routinely supply scandal and drama.

Fully existing only in the interval between desire and fulfillment, we swell with the illusion of our distinctive self.But fulfillment brings little or no satisfaction; lack of satisfaction makes us desire again, extending into the future the original illusion of the desiring self and its discontents.

The healthiest form of life is manual labour in a monastery: the most bracing truths of body and mind lie in physical exercise and silent contemplation and that, with words and thoughts, one starts to slide into harmful untruth.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Run and Hide

“... for the weak and the ineffectual, who cannot rise to the dignity and nobility of tragedy, or the luxury of irony, for whom even ordinary acts of will are impossible, melodrama is a substitute. People deprived of the capacity to change their fate can only repetitively lament this fact, and since they belong to the vast majority of the world's population, melodrama should be taken seriously for its world-historical impact.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Run and Hide

“Brought up into a life with little meaning, we had convinced ourselves that meaningful ways of being existed, and we would find them. In reality, this amounted to running this way and that, uncertain of our destination, and looking back enquiringly all the time.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Run and Hide