“See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“I was looking for the key for years
But the door was always open”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.
"Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power.
"I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse.
"Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices.
"See, the Muslims have one god.
"The Christians have three gods.
"And we Hindus have 36,000,004 divine arses to choose from.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“A White Tiger keeps no friends. It's too dangerous.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor - they never overlap, do they?
See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?
Losing weight and looking like the poor.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“If only a man could spit his past out so easily.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“You can't expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what's the point of living. I really wonder...'
The point of living? My heart pounded The point of your living is that if you die, who's going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month? ”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, ‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—"we" entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in ... Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—as strong, as talented, as inteligent in every way—to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this - but where my genuine concern for him ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell: no servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are.
"Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?
"We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“...the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Incidentally, sir, while we're on the topic of yoga - may I just say that an hour of deep breathing, yoga, and meditation in the morning constitutes the perfect start to the entrepreneur's day. How I would handle the stresses of this fucking business without yoga, I have no idea. Make yoga a must in all Chinese schools - that's my suggestion.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“Go to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“He read me another poem, and another one - and he explained the true history of poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men. Mr. Premier, I won't be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That's why, on day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself.”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
“تتخمر الكثير من الأفكار الغريبة في قلبك حين تمضي وقتاً طويلاً مع الكتب ,, القديمة ..”
― Aravind Adiga, quote from The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
Born place: in Madras, India
Born date October 23, 1974
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“With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Tropic of Capricorn
“When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]
“It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson," said he. "A candid observer would certainly declare that we were so already before we embarked upon so wild an experiment.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from His Last Bow
“Anyone else feel like that? Like your life's a big act. Like you're trying to be a man when you're just a scared kid, trying to keep under control when you really want to scream, cry, maybe hit someone. Ever feel like you're breathing underwater, and you have to stop because you're gulping in too much fluid?”
― Alex Flinn, quote from Breathing Underwater
“We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Edible Woman
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Under the VolcanoBookQuoters 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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