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Essay Quotes

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Essay Quotes

“In united families, they might sleep with half filled stomach but no one sleeps with empty stomach.”

“You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.”

“Don't compare the size of your roof with the size of the sky.”

“An invention is a responsibility of the individual, society cannot invent, it can only applaud the invention and inventor.”

“Before you worry about the beauty of your body, worry about the health of your body.”

“Hunger gives flavour to the food.”

“Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.”

“Don't always use prudence for precaution, sometimes use it for progress.”

“India’s success in building a modern state that defied predictions of its demise derived from its thorough insistence on institutionalizing what was Mahatma Gandhi’s greatest bequest to the freedom movement: the construction of a new Indian nation, not by suppressing its many particularities but by incorporating them into a new composite identity that preserved in “marble-cake” fashion all its constituent diversities across ethnic, religious, and racial lines. These diversities, far from being obliterated, acquired salience depending on context but, being enmeshed and free-flowing, they erased the boundaries between the insular and national identities, congealing the latter even as they preserved the former. The modern Indian polity, therefore, emerged not as a nation-state since, given its myriad diversities, it could not be so—but rather as a nations-state. Under the rubric of “unity in diversity,” its different ethnic, religious, and racial groups combined to create a novel, multilayered political identity. However confusing that reality may be to the outside world, it is authentically and indisputably Indian.”

“India’s post-independence leadership eschewed parochial nationalism in favor of civic nationalism where the rights and privileges of being Indian were conceived as arising not from some pre-existent modes of belonging—religion, race, or ethnicity—but instead from participation in a collective political endeavor.”

“Anger gets you into trouble, ego keeps you in trouble.”

“Sacrifice of the self is sheer stupidity if sacrifice is not for the self.”

“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”

“Ce n'est pas pour cracher dans la soupe, mais il faut être honnête: non, mon amoureux n'est pas parfait. Il ne me viole pas et ne me frappe pas, il fait la vaisselle, passe l'aspirateur et me traite avec le respect que je mérite. C'est ça, être parfait? Ou bien est-ce la moindre des choses? Les standards sont-ils tellement bas que les hommes peuvent s'en tirer à si bon compte?”

“I won't deny that it is possible for our restless hearts to find rest in God, but I do want to deny that this rest results from the satisfaction of our desires. God does not save us from our hungers by satisfying them. God saves us from the tyranny of our desires by saving us from the impossible work of satisfying them. [from the essay "The God Who Weeps: Notes, Amens, and Disagreements)”

“It's time to shop high heels if your fiance kisses you on the forehead.”

“No tricks, no tools, but talent makes a task truly top class.”

“Arrogant men with knowledge make more noise from their mouth than making a sense from their mind.”

“Prudence is precaution, prudence is protection.”

“When wealth goes only happiness goes, when health goes even the hope goes.”

“Principles in a poor is admirable as politeness in a prince.”

“Before we complicated life with money, machines and missiles we did well with morals, manpower and meetings.”

“With right fashion, every female would be a flame.”

“Fashion doesn't make you perfect, but it makes you pretty.”

“Dresses don't look beautiful on hangers.”

“Dresses won't worn out in the wardrobe, but that is not what dresses are designed for.”

“Writing is an exhausting and demoralizing task that destroys human conceits. Writing an elongated series of personal essay opens a person’s mind to explore paradoxes and discover previously unrealized personal truths. Writing is as arduous as any trek into the wilderness. Every sentence takes a writer deeper into the jungle of the mind, a world of frightening inconsistencies created by our waking life’s desire that the world of chaos conform to our convenience.”

“In modern times couples are more concerned about loyalty than love.”

“No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are. But it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin.”

“Music is the fastest motivator in the world.”

“You can not control the thought, but you can control the tongue.”

“I, too, want to feel the heat with somebody or, at worst, I want to be a child of the heat's eager production, the smoke that rises & dances thick in the air, a ghost over those who labor in our names & then become the ghosts themselves & it's a shame our wings don't arrive until after we've already raced off the cliff & met whatever waits below & it's a shame to still have living hands & barely anything left worthy of touch.”

“Let someone else be the most powerful country, make ours the most peaceful country.”

“When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.”

“Faster is fatal, slower is safe.”

“One who doesn't recognise an opportunity is bigger loser than one who tries his hand at an opportunity.”

“In any game, the game itself is the prize, no matter who wins, ultimately both lose the game.”

“If she says goodbye, someone else will say hi.”

“Civilians enjoy their time because soldiers sacrifice their time.”

“Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.”