Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.
There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have . . .
It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.
Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.
But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in
Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)
History is really a study of the future, not the past.
Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
To understand history,’ Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.
History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.
How history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.
Certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.
When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
Enemies can’t break your spirit, only friends can.
Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.
Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles…
Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.
Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.
From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.
But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?
In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said.
That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.
Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate. He held her close by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as though he had been polished with a high-wax body polish.
There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot – that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.
She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.
NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.
Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.
She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims…
[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.
Cow, goat, chicken, lamb . . . only slaves eat like this,’ Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on to his plate. ‘Our stomachs are graveyards.
There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.
His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.
Socrates asked the key question: why should we be moral?
Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights,” and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.
Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?
Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises–War and Shopping–simply will not work.
How can you measure progress if you don’t know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the “market” put a price on things – food, clothes, electricity, running water – when it doesn’t take into account the REAL cost of production?
They looked at each other. They weren’t thinking anymore. The time for that had come and gone. Smashed smiles lay ahead of them. But that would be later. Lay Ter.
He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her.
Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat.
Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.
The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time. I think we need to talk about vases.Did you hear the sound of the white flower?
In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest.
Ammu’s tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.
And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.
She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright.
I think one of the saddest things that’s happening to literature is that it’s getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.
You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.
I have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticize that easily.
Everyone thinks I live alone, but I don’t. My characters all live with me.