Quotes from The Best of Ruskin Bond

Ruskin Bond ·  428 pages

Rating: (2.1K votes)


“People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity.

Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond


“And when all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful.”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond


“Well, it often happens that people with good eyesight fail to see what is right in front of them.”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond


“Everyone says she’s mad.’
‘How do they know?’ I asked.
‘Because she’s different from other people, I suppose.’
‘Is that being mad?’
‘No. Not really, I suppose madness is not seeing things as others see them.”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond


“It’s easy to rob a greedy man, because he deserves to be robbed; it’s easy to rob a rich man, because he can afford to be robbed; but it’s difficult to rob a poor man, even one who really doesn’t care if he’s robbed”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond



“To the inhabitants of the pond, the pond was the world; and to the inhabitants of the world, the world was but a muddy pond.”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond


“It is supposed to be in very bad taste to discuss a person behind his back; and to discuss a dead person behind his back is most unfair, for he cannot even retaliate.”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond


“When the whistling-thrush released
A deep sweet secret on the trembling air;
Blackbird on the wing, bird of the forest shadows,
Black rose in the long ago summer,
This was your song:
It isn’t time that’s passing by,
It is you and I.”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond


“When I have sung my songs to you, I’ll sing no more,’ goes the old ballad. But for one faithful listener, Nelson Eddy is still singing.”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond


“There is skill in all things, even in making porridge. Dry bread at home is better than curried prawns abroad. Eating and drinking should not keep men from thinking. Better a small fish than an empty dish. Let not your tongue cut your throat. I”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond



“when all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful. Ruskin”
― Ruskin Bond, quote from The Best of Ruskin Bond


About the author

Ruskin Bond
Born place: in Kasauli, British Indian Ocean Territory
Born date May 19, 1934
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Popular quotes

“At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life. Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious”
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“The memories are very fucking great. I never want to forget. Ever. I’d rather die than not have these memories. Is that great enough for you?”
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“It’s your incalculable ability to trust others that has always touched me. And I’m sorry to have taken advantage of it so many times”
- Dr. Paige”
― James Dashner, quote from The Fever Code


“The air between them filled with all that remained unsaid. All that should be said.
Yet wasn't.”
― Renee Ahdieh, quote from Flame in the Mist


“was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere; sightseeing”
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