Quotes from An Equal Music

“Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music-not too much, or the soul could not sustain it-from time to time.”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“But I was her first love, as she was mine. Nor have I ever been in love since. But then I have never fallen out of love with her – with her, I suppose, as she then was, or as I grew afterwards to realize or imagine she had been. What is she now, who is she now? Am I with such inane fidelity fixated on someone who could have utterly changed (but could she have? could she really have changed so much?), who could have grown to hate me for leaving her, who could have forgotten me or learned deliberately to expunge me from her mind. How many seconds or weeks after seeing me…did I survive her thoughts?”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“In a clear brook
With joyful haste
The whimsical trout
Shot past me like an arrow

I play the line of the song, I play the leaps and plunges of the right hand of the piano, I am the trout, the angler, the brook, the observer.”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“In the painting I saw, in the books I read, I recalled her, for she her had in many ways been the making of me.”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“Strange to be a man and never grow big with child. To feel a part of you opening, and a part of you leaving, and howling as if it were not a part of you.”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“The past is the past, and he can't make amends, only hope that the gain will outlast the damage.”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“Let the smoky Käll sustain himself on Mars, and Yuko lay rue on Beethoven’s grave. Let the lord of the manor of Rochdale clap his coffin into a canoe and disport himself on the waters. Let Zsa-Zsa sleep on a pillow of haddock in Maria’s cello case. Let Mrs Wessen live to see her thousandth moon. Let Ysobel unknit her forehead. Let not poor Virginie weep. Let all and no things come to pass, for how will I pass these days?”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“Well, what do you think? Avanti?"
"Avanti," cries everyone, and, after a few quick re-tunings of our instruments, and re-initialisings of our hearts, we enter the slow theme-and-variations movement.
How good it is to pay this quintet, to play it, not to work at it - to play for our own joy, with no need to convey anything to anyone outside our ring of recreation, with no expectation of a future stage, of the too-immediate sop of applause. The quintet exists without us yet cannot exist without us. It sings to us, we sing into it, and somehow, through these little black and white insects clustering along five thin lines, the man who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed speaks into us across land and water and ten generations, and fills us here with sadness, here with amazed delight.”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

“I walk across the park to her flat. It is over-heated and there is a great deal of pink. This used not to unnerve me. Now when I step into the bathroom I recoil.
Pink bath, pink basin, pink toilet, pink bidet, pink tiles, pink wallpaper, pink rug. Brushes, soap, tooth brush, silk flowers, toilet paper: all pink. Even the little foot-operated waste-bin is pale pink. I know this little waste-bin well. Every time I sleep here I wonder what I am doing with my time and hers. She is sixteen years younger than I am. She is not the woman with whom I want to share my life. But, having begun, what we have continues. She wants it to, and I go along with it, through lust and loneliness, I suppose; and laziness, and lack of focus.”
― Vikram Seth, quote from An Equal Music

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Popular quotes

“A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.”
― Naomi Wolf, quote from The Beauty Myth

“The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so
completely modern in spirit. There was hardly a soul in the firm
who was not perfectly well aware that publicity - advertising - is
the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced. In the red
lead firm there had still lingered certain notions of commercial
honour and usefulness. But such things would have been laughed at
in the New Albion. Most of the employees were the hard-boiled,
Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is
sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The
public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a
swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final
naivete, the blind worship of the money-god.”
― George Orwell, quote from Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around the small of my back, tugging me to his chest. I threw my arms around his shoulders, sliding my nails up and down his neck gently. “Stay with me. And with Nathaniel and Lauren. All day. Be happy today.”
“That’s it?”
He bent down and kissed me richly. “Each time I look at you, I want to see a smile on your beautiful face.”
“Will you be looking at me a lot?”
“I’m always stealing glances,” he confessed. “You rarely notice.”
― Courtney Allison Moulton, quote from Wings of the Wicked

“Please don't look for me. You won't find me.”
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“To summarize, where the time is least is also where the time for the nearby paths is nearly the same; that's where the little arrows point in nearly the same direction and add up to a substantial length; that's where the probability of a photon reflecting off a mirror is determined. And that's why, in approximation, we can get away with the crude picture of the world that says that light only goes where the time is least (and it's easy to rpve that were the time is least, the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection, but I don't have the time to show you).

So the theory of quantum electrodynamics gave the right answer-the middle of the mirror is the important part for reflection-but this correct result came out at the expense of believing that light reflects all over the mirror, and having to add a bunch of little arrows together whose sole purpose was to cancel out. All that might seem to you to be a waste of time-some silly game for mathematicians only. After all, it doesn't seem like "real physics" to have something there that only cancels out!”
― Richard Feynman, quote from QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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