I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me.
They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love.
Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.
Moving a zoo is like moving a city.
We left Madras on June 21st, 1977, on the Panamanian-registered Japanese cargo ship Tsimtsum.
To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you.
What I had before me was a spectacle of wind and water, an earthquake of the senses, that even Hollywood couldn’t orchestrate.
The guttural eruptions and long flowing vowels rolled just beneath my comprehension like a beautiful brook. I gazed into this brook for long spells of time. It was not wide, just one man’s voice, but it was as deep as the universe.
On a day when I estimated it was my mothers birthday, I sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her out loud.
How could the stars, sparkle as they might, help me find my way if they kept moving?
The stars shone with such fears, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
I am grateful. It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story.
That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality?
Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God’s, that the self-righteous should rush.
These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, “Business as usual.” But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.
Until it knows its rank for certain, the animal lives a life of unbearable anarchy.
If a man, boldest and most intelligent of creatures, won’t wander from place to place, a stranger to all, beholden to none, why would an animal, which is by temperament far more conservative?
When Mr. Kumar visited the zoo, it was to take the pulse of the universe, and his stethoscopic mind always confirmed to him that everything was in order, that everything was order.
She heard “Hairless Christians”, and that is what they were to her for many years. When I corrected her, I told her that in fact she was not so wrong; that Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims.
The man told Henry that the only native talent needed to play music well was joy.
Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language.