Radhika Mukherjee Quotes

It was like dawn, and then dusk cascading over the Himalayas. First, the gradual brightening over snow and contour, then the shining, sparkling sun mirrored; and then as the moment of joy passed – the lingering colour-changing light; reluctant to leave. That faint, bittersweet almost-light, and then indigo outlines and inky black. ~ Radhika Mukherjee

Whatever work you undertake, do it seriously, thoroughly and well; never leave it half-done or undone, never feel yourself satisfied unless and until you have given it your very best. Cultivate the habits of discipline and toleration. Surrender not the convictions you hold dear but learn to appreciate the points of view of your opponents. ~ Syama Prasad Mukherjee

Her veins and arteries ran with a bitter fluid, not blood, Adinath exclaimed in fury one day. ~ Neel Mukherjee

Cancer is a tremendous opportunity to have your face pressed right up against the glass of your mortality. But what patients see through the glass is not a world outside cancer, but a world taken over by it - cancer reflected endlessly around them like a hall of mirrors. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

So Sona does what he has perfected: he becomes two persons, an outer one that goes through the motions required of him, and an inner one that is the true, pure he. ~ Neel Mukherjee

Dullness is a kind of luxury. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer. ~ Neel Mukherjee

The sanction made the unsaid even more palpable, as if the thoughts had been waiting outside the room, and had at last been given permission to enter; now there was no denying their presence. ~ Neel Mukherjee

The pain in Vinay's voice disturbed Radhika. "Shangri-La is a state of mind, Vinay. If you're happy, then everything around you will be okay and in harmony. Nothing is perfect anywhere. We must find our own paradise amidst the chaos. Just the way a beautiful lotus blooms in dirty water. ~ Nita Bajoria (The Leap)

Nécessité absolue trouver origine de cet emmerdement [It is absolutely necessary to find the origin of this pain in the ass]. - Jacques Monod ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Nineteenth-century doctors often linked cancer to civilization: cancer, they imagined, was caused by the rush and whirl of modern life, which somehow incited pathological growth in the body. The link was correct, but the causality was not: civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans - civilization unveiled it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Maybe next time, don't bite the girl you fancy. ~ Radhika Sanghani

The word metastasis, used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another, is a curious mix of meta and stasis - "beyond stillness" in Latin - an ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It felt - nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos - that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I don't read my books, so I don't allow myself the dangerous luxury of toying with the idea of doing things differently. ~ Neel Mukherjee

Children with cancer, as one surgeon noted, were typically "tucked in the farthest recesses of the hospital wards." They were on their deathbeds anyway, the pediatricians argued; wouldn't it be kinder and gentler, some insisted, to just "let them die in peace"? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. ~ Neel Mukherjee

The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right? ~ Neel Mukherjee

In China, lung cancer is already a leading cause of death attributable to smoking in men. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Min Chiu Li, the researcher who had been expelled from the institute for treating women with placental tumors with methotrexate long after their tumors had visibly disappeared. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

If we didn't kill the tumor, we killed the patient. - William Moloney on the early days of chemotherapy ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Bailey had profoundly changed the conversation around sexual identity away from the 1960s rhetoric of "choice" and "personal preference" toward biology, genetics, and inheritance. If we did not think of variations in height or the development of dyslexia or type 1 diabetes as choices, then we could not think of sexual identity as a choice. But ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help. ~ Neel Mukherjee

It is not what you have," as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, "it is what you do with it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

What 'next level' I wanted to scream! The level of sleepless nights and zero disposable income? Is being constantly tired and borderline broke supposed to make us more in love or something? And what makes you think that as a couple we haven't already reached that level of pain and anxiety? Perhaps we did it without having kids! Maybe that is how fabulous we are. Did anyone think of that? ~ Radhika Vaz

Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.' ~ Bharati Mukherjee

The landscape of carcinogens is not static either. We are chemical apes: having discovered the capacity to extract, purify, and react molecules to produce new and wondrous molecules, we have begun to spin a new chemical universe around ourselves. Our bodies, our cells, our genes are thus being immersed and reimmersed in a changing flux of molecules
pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, estrogens, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses, such as radiation and magnetism. Some of these, inevitably, will be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away; our task, then, is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I'm much more attracted to the miscegenation of cultures than to harmony. ~ Neel Mukherjee

There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

A rainbow looks good because the colours demonstrate restrain. Otherwise it would be an ugly blob. ~ Arindam Mukherjee

I think when we use 'stress', we are often using a kind of dummy word to try to fit many different things into one big category. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It was, I suspected, not the first time that a patient had consoled a doctor about the ineffectuality of his discipline. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

11 pm: Heart's pounding, hands shaking. Have these knots in my stomach. But drinking isn't an option. Maa is sleeping with me. Baba in Lalitaji's room. And she on the sofa.
Want to step into the toilet, take one swig, and then go directly to sleep. How the hell will Maa know? I mean she's sleeping like a log. No, no, shouldn't. What if she wakes up? She's a light sleeper, after all.
11.30 pm: No wine. Or vodka. Terrible, terrible night. When will they go back to Kolkata and let me be?
11.32 pm: Chhi . . .Chhi . . . How selfish am I? My parents, one with a heart condition, spent thousands on flight tickets and landed in Chennai. Why? Because they wanted to spend time with their widowed daughter. And what does the daughter want? To sneak into the toilet and take one good swig of wine. Shame on her!
Okay, now I'm being over-dramatic. ~ Chitrangada Mukherjee

We are all equal children before our mother; and India asks each one of us, in whatsoever role we play in the complex drama of nation-building, to do our duty with integrity, commitment and unflinching loyalty to the values enshrined in our Constitution. ~ Pranab Mukherjee

The biological universe was full of molecules picking out their partners like clever locks designed to fit a key: toxins clinging inseparably to antitoxins, dyes that highlighted only particular parts of cells, chemical stains that could nimbly pick out one class of germs from a mixture of microbes. If biology was an elaborate mix-and-match game of chemicals, Ehrlich reasoned, what if some chemical could discriminate bacterial cells from animal cells--and kill the former without touching the host? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

What we deplore is not that the gate of western knowledge was thrown open to Indians, but that such knowledge was imported to India at the sacrifice of our own cultural heritage. What was needed was a proper synthesis between the two systems and not neglect, far less destruction, of the Indian base. ~ Syama Prasad Mukherjee

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Seek simplicity, but distrust it," Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee