Indian Fiction Quotes

Mistakes are not bad; excuses are. ~ Udai Yadla

I wash the clothes, rinse them and then scrub them again. Will that square little box do that? I am not using any fancy machines when my hands will do. ~ Renita D'Silva

You have not failed until you accept your failure. ~ Udai Yadla

In the white marble hall of the hotel, I'm waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we're dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

What am I doing here, Reena? Why am I dancing to the tunes of that old hag?'You are saving your family. ~ Renita D'Silva

Every time you think of your dad, you're
resurrecting him. Why shouldn't he continue to live
in this world while resting in the other? ~ Clyde DeSouza

The time is ripe for young Indian authors writing in the English language. ~ Anurag Shourie

There is nothing more amazing than being with the one you love. ~ Shilpi

Everything in this world happens with a purpose. You are born in this world with a purpose, you are chosen by purpose. ~ Udai Yadla

What use is status if you have no one to share it with, Dad? ~ Renita D'Silva

Every act of goodness is born from our desire to be happy. ~ Udai Yadla

Sometimes, it is easier to leave things as they are, rather than to fight, go against the flow. ~ Renita D'Silva

What better hiding place than an old, woodlice-ridden album of photographs! ~ Renita D'Silva

When you have power and use it for destructive purpose: you don't deserve it. ~ Udai Yadla

I uttered the wisest thing that you must say to an angry woman - "I'm sorry. ~ Mita Jain

I was travelling through a tunnel of light. The more I travelled, the lighter I felt. I was filled with a kind of ecstasy that I had never known before. I was moving closer and closer to the source of this beautiful light. All I wanted was to merge with that light. But suddenly I fell, like a flower falling off its stem, and returned to my body. ~ Benyamin

What wouldn't my people give for a few bites of the biryani she ordered me to throw away yesterday because she said it smelt? ~ Renita D'Silva

It's best to be alone when you are sad. I wanted to be myself and feel my strength slowly seeping back into me. ~ Benyamin

Failure is the greatest teacher. ~ Udai Yadla

Every family has secrets, Reena, and they're there for a reason. ~ Renita D'Silva

A community that engages readers and culturally enabled people to connect, support and harness intellectual and cultural capabilities. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

And so, here is Rapa's book, my tribute to her, my one true friend, my love. ~ Poile Sengupta

When it's possible for you to dream, it's not impossible to achieve. ~ Udai Yadla

There's an explosion of Indian fiction of all kinds, from military thrillers to chicklit. I think that's exciting. ~ Hari Kunzru

You are a girl, Shirin. Girls don't run around naked.'Why?'They just don't. ~ Renita D'Silva

Every happy moments looks perfect till it gets messy ~ Sheeja Jose

When you treat your failures as lessons, you can never fail. ~ Udai Yadla

The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money. ~ Aravind Adiga

Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

It did not cross the minds of most Hindus that barring exceptions, they were responsible for Catholicism in India. The outcastes of Hinduism, the untouchables, who fell beyond the pale of the caste system had ample reason to convert to Catholicism. The caste-Hindus, as a matter of fact, left them no choice. As sub-humans they were little better than slaves. ~ Kiran Nagarkar

I watched the rows and rows of chappals left by devotees outside the Hindu temple and wondered if the homeless boys who sometimes steal our chickens ever steal them, and if they do, are they punished, and if so by whom? ~ Renita D'Silva

You don't live in luxury! You are relegated to sleep in the little store room behind the kitchen with the cockroaches and rats and are at the mercy of Mrs. Gupta,' Reena was indignant. 'It's five-star accommodation compared to a mud hut. ~ Renita D'Silva

It's beyond your consciousness that your soul lingers with the person you love and hence your mood will affect the one you love. This is the reason why you sometimes sense your mood changing mysteriously with no reason. ~ Udai Yadla

She looked so beautiful, with every smile of hers, I was falling for her. She had the perfect set of teeth for the perfect face to make up that perfect smile. ~ Pritam Banikk

Believe in your greatness. Because what you believe is what you become. ~ Udai Yadla

They dressed for dinner and followed the strict discipline of upper class English families. The next morning they took me with them for the county fox hunt. Since I could not ride, I asked to be excused. But I did get to see the ritual of dress, the hierarchy observed among hunting types, the blowing of horns, the handling of beagles, a poor fox being run to death and having its tail (brush) cut off. Having achieved their object, glasses of sherry were passed round like prasad after a religious service. ~ Khushwant Singh

Oh Pia, I feel GOOD! Fully recovered!' he always says in a dazzling tone that tells everyone within a ten-kilometre radius that he's not. ~ Aditi Mathur Kumar

There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas. ~ Hari Kunzru

Why? Why did you kill them?"

He laughed, recognizing it bore a frightening coldness. "Because you walked through the wrong door, and they paid you to do it. You will be a testament to the terror that arrives the moment you or anyone else crosses the invisible line you didn't know existed until tonight. Spread the word. ~ G.S. Jennsen

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn't count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer. ~ Eudora Welty

I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction. ~ Candace Camp

When you were dealing with a person separated from everybody by an invisible thick glass wall - like a bubble where he didn't let anybody in - every little thing mattered. ~ Tatiana Vedenska

I think, for sure, 'Saturday Night Fever' and 'Pulp Fiction' were kind of bookends for - or the pillars of - my career. ~ John Travolta

Catastrophe and exuberance are often partners in the dance of irony. ~ Jeff W. Horton

When we came out of the cookhouse, we found the boy's father, the Indian man who had been grazing the horses in the pasture, waiting for us. He wanted someone to tell his troubles to. He looked about guardedly, afraid that the Señora might overhear him.

'Take a look at me' he said. I don't even know how old I am. When I was young, the Señor brought me here. He promised to pay me and give me a plot of my own. 'Look at my clothes' he said, pointing to the patches covering his body. 'I can't remember how many years I've been wearing them. I have no others. I live in a mud hut with my wife and sons. They all work for the Señor like me. They don't go to school. They don't know how to read or write; they don't even speak Spanish. We work for the master, raise his cattle and work his fields. We only get rice and plantains to eat. Nobody takes care of us when we are sick. The women here have their babies in these filthy huts.'

'Why don't you eat meat or at least milk the cows?' I asked.

'We aren't allowed to slaughter a cow. And the milk goes to the calves. We can't even have chicken or pork - only if an animal gets sick and dies. Once I raised a pig in my yard' he went on. 'She had a litter of three. When the Señor came back he told the foreman to shoot them. That's the only time we ever had good meat.'

'I don't mind working for the Señor but I want him to keep his promise. I want a piece of land of my own so I can grow rice and yucca and ~ Yossi Ghinsberg

How can we learn the value of saying no, if we didn't occasionally say yes? ~ F.D. Lee

I like fish; no fish business for me.

Tuball's say. Enzo's Lemorine pet. ~ Jordano Quaglia

i write
because

it is
the only way

i can
reach you. ~ Sanober Khan

Every novel is a debtor to Homer. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta's permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite - a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was "a soldier for the tribal people". He didn't mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite "giri" - hill - in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this "soldier for the tribal people" looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias - the "Rich India" and the "Poor India" - as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody's intelligence, including his own.)

The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winn ~ Arundhati Roy

All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand."

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument "whose strings buzzed," and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I am somebody. I used to think I was invisible because nobody noticed me, but I set fire to my fear. I am free. I am here, and if it's going to be me against the world, then I am ready. After all the shit I've been through, I can handle anything that comes my way. I am not going to ever let anyone make me feel less than a human being - because I matter. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Interviewer ...In the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain--or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing -- flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc. -- is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In da ~ David Foster Wallace

The thing about being an Indian person is that you feel most at home with your own people. ~ Winona LaDuke

When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction. ~ Adrian Tomine

I was in a place I had never visited before and I didn't want to ever visit again.
I was in hell, or so I thought… ~ J.K. Ellem

A stream of light shot out of her lips, it wasn't blinding though, it was luminescent. It stopped abruptly and Aaron saw the light leave her eyes before she fell, and he swept in to catch her crumpling form.
Eric was right beside them in a flash. "What did you do to her?" He seethed at Darragh, jumping to his feet and tackling him. ~ Shayna Varadeaux

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. ~ Robert Jordan

In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it. ~ Frederick Lenz

Next time
we will roll out the red carpet for you in the United States of Arabia, my brethren! ~ Leonard Leventon

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today. ~ Paul Kane

You can't have a future until you accept the past. That doesn't mean you have to live the way you used to, but it does mean you can't deny what made you who you are. You made mistakes. Own them and move on. ~ Tammy L. Gray

Jane sobbed even harder, not noticing the sounds of footsteps coming up behind her. A cold wind blew, and she shivered in it. As her eyes hung between tears, she looked out and saw a shape where the car had been. It was a figure, slim and wrapped in a gray shroud. Almost the whole body was covered, save for a single blue eye that stared at her intently. Jane stared back until she felt a warm hand touch her shoulder and a cold voice whisper in her ear.
"You are never alone. ~ Eric Nierstedt

As long as I live, I will always remember those wee children standing at the railing on that ship. - John Hanlon, the sailor ~ Deana J. Driver

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction. ~ Ray Bradbury

What is generally missed, is that my writing financed research. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

If you are never open to change things will remain the same, thereby driving you insane. ~ Clarine Williams

You brothers-such a nest of rivalries. I warned him to make you sisters, that it would make things more civilized. He thought I was joking, I wasn't. - Malcador ~ Chris Wraight

She realized, when relationships failed to last, it was not because love was no longer present, but because people had stopped believing in themselves and in their partners. ~ Christina Westover

Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar. ~ Adam Roberts

fiction writing can be a blast when you set aside debilitating notions of perfection and just dive headlong into the creative process. ~ Chris Baty

I sauntered to the kitchen, where the lone pot of afternoon coffee had been reduced to thick black syrup. Glad that no one was around to watch, I filled a Styrofoam cup halfway with the molten matter, swished it, and sniffed. Nose of burning rubber, with light tar accents. I topped it off with Sparklett's, then nuked it. Kills the germs. ~ Denise Hamilton

Children don't read 'genres'; they read stories. Below a certain age, they don't distinguish between 'true' and 'not true,' because they see no reason that a white rabbit shouldn't possess a pocket watch, that whales shouldn't talk, or that sentient beings shouldn't live on other planets and travel in spaceships. Science-fiction tropes aren't read as 'science fiction'; they're read as fiction. And fiction is read as reality. And sometimes reality lives under the bed and has very large teeth, and it's no use pretending otherwise. ~ Margaret Atwood