Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...
We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.
If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.
One minute you’ve got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it’s done a bunk.
Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.
Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.
History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.
In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.
Is birth always a fall?
Believe in your own eyes and you’ll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.
All names mean something.
Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.
If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.
Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.