"Later, sometimes I would look at the advertisements for diamonds and jewellery in the British Sunday magazines, or I would read their accounts of filmstar romances and I would wonder why it so happens that it is in this state, the state we call love, that people are most driven to enumerate and quantify, when the state itself, or so those very magazines tell us, is the obverse, the antithesis, of the notions of number and quantity. I would wonder what the circumstances could be that would prompt a man to tell a journalist exactly how much money he had spent, down to the last pound or dollar, on buying a car or an island for the woman he loved; I would wonder why the advertisements hinted so carefully at the exact price of the jewellery they urged men to buy for their girlfriends and lovers; why a girl had attempted suicide exactly nine times to get back the man she loves; why I had been driven to count all the yards that I had walked when I went to see Ila. I could think of no answer, except that it is because that state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings- the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horror from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite: it is as though we say to ourselves- he bought her a diamond worth exactly so much, or she gave up a career that would have earned her precisely so much- in hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically. And yet between that state and its metaphors there is no more connection than there is between a word, such as mat, and the thing itself: they are utterly indifferent to each other, so that we may heap the metephors- the diamonds, the suicides, the miles, the suffering- till the end of our abilities, and yet find no trace at all of the state itself. And equally we may find the opposite."
"He said to me once that one could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror."
The Shadow Lines
Amitav Ghosh
"It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stroies is that they have no secrets. The Great Strories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't decieve you with thrills and trick endings. They don't suprise you with the unforseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again."
"He didn't know that in some places, like the country Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough.That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cosy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Beacuse Worse Things had happened. In the country, where she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening."
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
“… I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
"The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."
"One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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