“Travel with the wit of an adult, and the wonder of a child.”
“Jobs fill your pockets, adventures fill your soul.”
“That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.”
Source: A Small Place
“Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history.”
Source: Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
“Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don’t sit down, sahib? It ain’t dirty. Is just how it does look.’
Ganesh didn’t sit down. ‘Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis.”
Source: The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street
“It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard.
‘Is Leela self who write that,’ Ramlogan said. ‘I didn’t ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.’
It read:
NOTICE
NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS!
ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS!
Ganesh said, ‘Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.’
That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib.”
Source: The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Source: The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Volume 5, 1709–1713
“—I don't believe in that shit, Oscar. That's our parents' shit.
—It's ours too, he said.”
Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“I say, ‘Man, you best behave youself this time, cause we ain’t never getting this mattress out from in here.’ … Berry say, ‘Don’t you worry about that. Cause I’s a married man now, I got to behave. My name done write.’ He say, ‘Why I going in some other bed when I got this big foam bed to lie in?’ I say, ‘It ain’t the bed it’s who does hot the sheets.’ He say, ‘Well best bring them sheets let we hot them up right now.”
Source: Blessed Is the Fruit: A Novel
“I ain't know what it is to be a girl Mistress Grandsol. I pass straight from child to woman without even a pause for girl between. Girl is a privilege I never know.”
Source: Blessed Is the Fruit: A Novel