Jeet Thayil Quotes

In certain ways the lives of the poets and the lives of the saints are similar: the solitary
travails, the epiphanic awakening and early actualisation, the thwarting
and the mercy, the small rewards, the false starts, the workaday miracles,
the joyous visions and fearful hallucinations, the flagellation of the
flesh and the lonely difficult deaths.

Women are more evolved biologically and emotionally, that's well known
and it's obvious. But they confuse sex and the spirit; they don't
separate. Men, as you know, always separate: they separate
their human and dog natures.

I've always liked the awkward young men and I'm no casteist, god no. I like boys, circumcised, uncircumcised, washed, unwashed, touchable, untouchable, straight, bent, curved, I mean, it's all love, isn't it, in the end?

So when Carl said, Why do you take drugs? she told him what she thought, told him the truth because the least such a question deserved was a real answer. She said, Oh, who knows, there are so many good reasons and nobody mentions them and the main thing nobody mentions is the comfort of it, how good it is to be a slave to something, the regularity and the habit of addiction, the fact that it's an antidote to loneliness, and the way it becomes your family, gives you mother love and protection and keeps you safe.

There's been some discussion as to why God created the world.
Let me clear it up.
He made the world because that's what he does. He makes things.
A more pertinent question, though pertinence is hardly the point at
this point: why did he make humans?
Now there's a question.
He made us as a bulwark against loneliness and boredom. Too late
he discovered we were in fact the opposite. We augment boredom; we
deepen loneliness.

He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did,and as was the case with all addicts,gratification was the important thing.

He said he'd teach her the important things, starting with the most important thing of all, the correct way to make tea and rice, so tea wasn't overbrewed and the rice wasn't overcooked. He said: You want to make food forget Indian way. Indian's system is like American system, everything overdone. They have no subtle. He sent her to buy octopus. She brought the tentacles home in a bag of ice and cut them into thin slices, at a sharp angle. She put the sliced octopus in a saucepan with ginger and green onions and added a black bean paste. He told her to touch the octopus to the flame and serve. But she let the dish cook for a good five minutes until the flesh was tough and rubbery. You overdid, he told her. Old Chinese saying, you don't need take off your pant to fart.

Near him were two men in hip-hop uniform, spotless footwear and
new baggy jeans and tilted Yankees caps. Shopping for blue jeans at
Macy's, Dismas had discovered that hip-hop labels were as expensive
as, if not more expensive than some of the high-end names he coveted.
Functional clothing designed to absorb sweat and repel mud cost as
much as designer eveningwear. Phat Farm, Armani, same difference.

Because now there's time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I'll have to stop, these are night-time tales that vanish in the sunlight like vampire dust

God has it in for the poets, that's obvious, but the Bombaywallahs hold a special place in his dispensation.

You've got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke. There's no point taking it seriously because whatever happens, and I mean whatever the fuck, the punch line is the same: you go out horizontally. You see the point? No fucking point.

Isn't it incredible?, I said.
There was nothing incredible about it, she said.
I thought it was so because I spoke English, because I read books, and because my parents paid for my education and my upkeep. For me everything was surprising, the world was full of wonder, the most random idiotic occurrence was incredible because my luck made it so. For people like her, for the poor, the only incredible thing in the whole world was money and the mysterious ways in which it worked.

He told Dimple that childhood was a kind of affliction, certainly physical and possibly mental. Children were at a hopeless disadvantage; they were unsuited for the world. They were short and ungainly and stupid, half-people, dwarf bundles of ectoplasm and shit, stunted organisms incapable of finding food and keeping their asses clean. They needed constant attention annd they couldn't communicate their needs. All they could do was wait for it to pass, years of waiting until the blight was gone.

I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay

He talks in proverbs. There's nothing I can say in reply.

All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.

You die. You get old and die. Your anger curdles, your grief dries,
your talent fades on the page. Your cells metastasise into an army
dedicated to the overthrow of you. You become dependent on paid
strangers for the maintenance of your blood and your brittle bones.
You understand that thought is the enemy, the source of all lesions,
tumours, and sarcomas; then thought becomes flesh becomes the
emblem of your shame.

Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts , and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender. An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency.

Those who say time heals and death resolves are speaking falsely or thoughtlessly or without the experience of loss.

Isn't violence a failure of the imagination, after all? And that failure, isn't it stupidity?

We're waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here.

In the sky was a sliver of moon. What kind of moon? A moon like a clipped fingernail, like a
smudge of powdered sugar, like a yellow laddoo, like a shattered dinner
plate, like the tusk of a wounded mammoth, like a scimitar buried in the enemy's skull, like a horned demon drowned in blood, like a fallen
warrior's silver visor, like the prow of a ghostly mothership, like the
smile of a giant black cat, like God's half-closed night-time eye, a low
murder moon

The kitchen was the bivouac of an insurgent army. Every surface had been colonised
by objects that had nothing to do with cooking: a rotating globe, illustrations
ripped from anatomy textbooks, toy Ambassador taxis from
India, an obsolete desktop computer, a shelf of floppy disks, miscellaneous
handwritten missives stuffed into folders. Making a cup of
coffee was a philosophical manoeuvre. You had to take a position.
You had to ask yourself, what is coffee? Why is it consumed? How far
would I go for a cup?