Suketu Mehta · 542 pages
Rating: (8.8K votes)
“And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“Each person’s life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“It is the sexual frenzy of a closed society, and the women of Golpitha are the gutters for these men's emissions.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“The stacks of pav have been sprinkled with chutney—
the top half of the inside of the bun is bathed in green chutney, the bottom with red garlic chutney—
and the assistant reaches out with one hand, in one continuous arc of his arm opening the pav, scooping up two of the vadas, one in each nest of pav, and delivering it to the hungry customer. I walk away from the stall and crush the vada by pressing down on it with the pav; little cracks appear in the crispy surface, and the vada oozes out its potato-and-pea mixture. I eat. The crispy batter, the mouthful of sweet-soft pav tempering the heat of the chutney, the spices of the vada mixture —dark with garam masala and studded with whole cloves of garlic that look like cashews—get masticated into a good mouthful, a good mouth-feel. My stomach is getting filled, and I feel I am eating something nourishing after a long spell of sobbing. Borkar has done his dharma.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“This is the true meaning of exile : some insurmountable force that keeps you from going back.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“The man who comes to fix the cable approaches her when she is alone in the house. 'Is there anything to eat?' he asks. 'There are some chapatis,' she replies. 'Can I get something to eat?' he repeats.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“It is as difficult to move down the caste ladder as it is to move up.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“A hit man's character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“The gang war will never end. Because at it's core , it is not the gangsters against the police or the gangster against another. It is a young man with a Mauser against history personal and political, it is revolution one murder at a time.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“Love exposes you, makes you vulnerable and kills the personas you built on top of your true self.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes, I lived in both of them at the same time.”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“Then there was the bhaiyyani next door, who Santosh started fucking two days after she got her first period and has been fucking steadily for five years, with the threat: “If you don’t allow me to fuck you I’ll kill you.” He climbs into her window when her drunk father is away, or passed out, and rapes her. There is nothing gentle about sexuality in the slum; it is furtive and feral. Once, a group of boys was spying on a couple asleep near the door of their room; the man had a hand on one of his wife’s breasts. Santosh reached in through the opening for the letterbox and started squeezing the wife’s other breast; she slept on, thinking that her husband was squeezing both. When she felt the extra pressure on one, she woke up and screamed but was too afraid to tell her husband what had happened. Much of what a woman in the slum puts up with she endures silently, because, as Sunil points out, “How can she tell the world what has been done to her?” They go after women who are vulnerable: the very young, the children or wives of drunkards, or women not right in the head. When their men discover what’s being done to them, they too most often keep it quiet. Who would want the world to know? What does it say about their manliness, that they were unable to protect their women? I”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“When the wolves are gone there will be too many caribou grazing the grass and the lemmings will starve. Without the lemmings the foxes and birds and weasels will die. Their passing will end smaller lives upon which even man depends, whether he knows it or not, and the top of the world will pass into silence.”
― Jean Craighead George, quote from Julie of the Wolves
“How can god give girls so much power? How can they turn productive, busy and ambitious men into a wilting mass of uselessness.”
― Chetan Bhagat, quote from Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition
“You don’t have to be awake to cry.”
― Mia Sheridan, quote from Leo
“You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg — that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors — GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE — keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn't necessarily need to be closed.”
― Paul Murray, quote from Skippy Dies
“La vejez tendría que ser la recompensa de una vida de mucho trabajo, pero no será más que un castigo si insistimos en seguir haciendo lo mismo de siempre, midiendo los logros del presente por el baremo de los del pasado y quedándonos cortos sin remedio.”
― quote from A Woman of Independent Means
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