…the face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying.
Birth and death – what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it’s freakish, let’s face it.
…I always took the rearmost seat in the classroom – it gave me a good view of things. And I must confess, the location taught me more about human nature and justice than could be learned from the professors’ lectures.
People forget how vulnerable they are despite their shirts and shoes and briefcases, how this hungry and cruel world could strip them, put them in the same position as my beggars.
Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.
Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.
Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain – try to remove it and you kill the patient.
The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.
Did life treat everyone so wantonly, ripping the good things to pieces while letting bad things fester and grow like fungus
Depression is a red herring,” said Nariman. “I think a lot about the past, it’s true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. and there is not much percentage in the future.
The joy and laughter and youth they brought was an antidote to the somberness enveloping his flat, the hours when he felt the very walls and ceilings were encrusted with the distress of of unhappy decades
Who would want to enter the soiled Temple of Justice, wherein lies the corpse of justice, slain by her very guardians? And now her killers make mock of the sacred process, selling replicas of her blind virtue to the highest bidder.
the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair
Where was the line between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness? And that was from her position. From theirs, it might be a line between mercy and cruelty, consideration and callousness.
democracy is a see-saw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion
A lifetime had to be crafted, just like anything else, she thought, it had to be moulded and beaten and burnished in order to get the most out of it.
Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.
You fellows are amazing,’ the sweaty cook roared over the stoves. ‘Everything happens to you only. Each time you come here, you have a new adventure story to entertain us
And the further they go, the more they’ll remember, they can take it from me.
I almost forgot to tell you – you have the right to remain silent, but if you do, my boys at the station will process your bones to help you confess.
Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder