“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
Vikram Seth
Born place: in Calcutta (now Kolkata), West Bengal, India
Born date June 20, 1952
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“You see, each country has a colour, a smell, and also a contagious sickness. In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it's arrogance, and in the United States it's ignorance."
"What about Rwanda?"
"Easy power and impunity. Here, there's total disorder. To someone who has a little money or powere, everything that seems forbidden elsewhere looks permissible and possible. All it takes is to dare it. Someone who's simply a liar in my country can be a fraud artist here, and the fraud artist gets to be a big-time thief. Chaos and most of all poverty give him powers he wouldn't have elsewhere.”
― Gil Courtemanche, quote from A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
“Song-Mi Lee,...her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought.”
― David Lodge, quote from Small World
“And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousness of self gives him an unusual dignity in the animal kingdom, he also pays a tragic price for it. The fact that the child has to identify -first- means that his very first identity is a social product. His habitation of his own body is built from the outside in; not from the inside out. He doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him. As the child responds to the vocal symbols learned from his object, he often gives the pathetic impression of being a true social puppet, jerked by alien symbols and sounds. What sensitive parent does not have his satisfaction tinged with sadness as the child repeats with such vital earnestness the little symbols that are taught him?”
― Ernest Becker, quote from The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man
“All will be well, if we do what is right”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Breathless
“I think I look like a leopard,” she remarked, pulling back to inspect her spotted arms and legs. Then that mischievous smile blossomed over her gorgeous lips. “Want to play connect the dots?”
― Jacquelyn Frank, quote from Elijah
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