Quotes

"Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history."

"“I go only to return," I said because Tamil has no words for last goodbyes."

"I write from solitude and I speak from solitude. Mateo Alemán in his Cuzmán de Alfarache and Francis Bacon in his essay Of Solitude, – both writing more or less at the same period – said that the man who seeks solitude has much of the divine and much of the beast in him. However I did not seek solitude. I found it. And from my solitude I think, work, and live – and I believe that I write and speak with almost infinite composure and resignation."

"Yang-Yang: I'm sorry, Grandma. It wasn't that I didn't want to talk to you. I think all the stuff I could tell you... You must already know. Otherwise, you wouldn't always tell me to 'Listen!' They all say you've gone away. But you didn't tell me where you went. I guess it's someplace you think I should know. But, Grandma, I know so little. Do you know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to tell people things they don't know. Show them stuff they haven't seen. It'll be so much fun. Perhaps one day... I'll find out where you've gone. If I do, can I tell everyone, and bring them to visit you? Grandma, I miss you. Especially when I see my newborn cousin who still doesn't have a name. He reminds me that you always said you felt old. I want to tell him that I feel I am old, too."

"Bear in mind... that you can be no man's judge. For a criminal can have no judge upon the earth until that judge himself has perceived that he is every bit as much a criminal as the man who stands before him... Only when he grasps this may he become a judge. If you are able to take upon yourself the crime of the man who stands before you and is judged by your heart... suffer for him yourself while letting him go without reproach."

"What a strange thing one's flesh and blood is. How strange are the ways that it brings us sorrow. When we were so soft and easily broken, when we moved from one side of the world to the other, we were like two eggs in one basket, like two ceramic balls that had been formed from the same earthen dough. It was in the company of your scowling, crying, laughing face that my childhood cracked, broke, was put back together unharmed, and so passed."

"Of their certainty, their unwavering firmness, perhaps - something only those whose life, language and culture have never been broken in two, as they have for us, are able to possess."

"They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things . . . none of them starving . . . but merely hungry for choice and certainty."

"Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected."

"My father had money in his account which belonged to me but he was very reluctant to send it because he wanted me to come home - to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond."

"Why did people ask 'What is it about?' as if a novel had to be about only one thing."

"Luckily they had both had this conversation so many times before that it ran, so to speak, all by itself, demanding of them nothing in the way of concentration."

"I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world."

"You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back."