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Quote by V.S. Naipaul

“The news about Eddoes and the shoes travelled round the street pretty quickly. My mother was annoyed. She said, ‘You see what sort of thing life is. Here I is, working my finger to the bone. Nobody flinging me a pair of shoes just like that, you know. And there you got that thin-arse little man, doing next to nothing, and look at all the things he does get.”

Quote by V.S. Naipaul

Work

Miguel Street

Miguel Street is a compilation of short stories that delve into the lives of the residents of a small Caribbean neighborhood. The narratives offer a vivid portrayal of the community's culture, struggles, and everyday experiences. more

Author

V.S. Naipaul

Browse famous quotes and profile details for V.S. Naipaul. more

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“This is what I learned while I walked Hattie home: Palmetto bugs are colossal roaches that thrive in hot climates and smell like Amaretto. They prefer the outdoors, but sometimes get lost and turn up in your house. If, as a five-year-old girl in Gainesville, Florida, you step into a steaming, oddly redolent shower, feel a light tap way up on your thigh, reflexively grab whatever just tapped you, find in your fist a roach with the heft of an operable pencil stub, fling it away, find a sharply bent leg affixed by its barbs to your middle finger’s meaty bottom phalange, repeatedly try to shake the leg off, repeatedly fail to shake the leg off, then sit in the tub and cry and cry, you’ll become a lyric poet, and your stomach will, from that day forward, repeatedly try to empty itself whenever you catch the scent of Amaretto. So, gum or no gum, no kiss good night. We dated nine months.”

“I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas.”

“Michelangelo alone would tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The question of form was for him a religious matter; for him and only for him it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art; of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the terrible in his forms that frightened his contemporaries. No man ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel into a buried world.”

“What frightens me is that when a country begins to extend its influence by strong arm methods beyond its borders under the guise of security it is difficult to see how a line can be drawn. If the policy is accepted that [Russia] has a right to penetrate her immediate neighbors . . . penetration of the next immediate neighbors becomes at a certain time equally logical. [W. Averell Harriman, US Ambassador to USSR, Sept 20, 1944]”