Suketu Mehta Maximum City Quotes

All the criminals do their work on the screen, which people can see. Politicians work behind the screen, which the public can't see.1 - Gang leader Chotta Shakeel, in Suketu Mehta, Maximum City ~ Dinesh D'Souza

It is the sexual frenzy of a closed society, and the women of Golpitha are the gutters for these men's emissions. ~ Suketu Mehta

I asked Raghav, as we were looking over the wasteland, if the Muslims they burnt would beg for their lives. "Yes they would say, Have mercy on us. But we were filled with such hate; we had Radhabi Chawl on our minds. And even if there was one who said, Let him go, there would be ten others saying, No kill him. And so we had to kill him.

"But what if he was innocent?"

Raghav looked at me. "His biggest crime was that he was Muslim. ~ Suketu Mehta

A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it's incomplete. ~ Ai Weiwei

This is the true meaning of exile : some insurmountable force that keeps you from going back. ~ Suketu Mehta

Love exposes you, makes you vulnerable and kills the personas you built on top of your true self. ~ Suketu Mehta

The man who comes to fix the cable approaches her when she is alone in the house. 'Is there anything to eat?' he asks. 'There are some chapatis,' she replies. 'Can I get something to eat?' he repeats. ~ Suketu Mehta

It was when I realised I had a new nationality: I was in exile. I am an adulterous resident: when I am in one city, I am dreaming of the other. I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing. ~ Suketu Mehta

The stacks of pav have been sprinkled with chutney -
the top half of the inside of the bun is bathed in green chutney, the bottom with red garlic chutney -
and the assistant reaches out with one hand, in one continuous arc of his arm opening the pav, scooping up two of the vadas, one in each nest of pav, and delivering it to the hungry customer. I walk away from the stall and crush the vada by pressing down on it with the pav; little cracks appear in the crispy surface, and the vada oozes out its potato-and-pea mixture. I eat. The crispy batter, the mouthful of sweet-soft pav tempering the heat of the chutney, the spices of the vada mixture - dark with garam masala and studded with whole cloves of garlic that look like cashews - get masticated into a good mouthful, a good mouth-feel. My stomach is getting filled, and I feel I am eating something nourishing after a long spell of sobbing. Borkar has done his dharma. ~ Suketu Mehta

A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving. ~ Suketu Mehta

The gang war will never end. Because at it's core , it is not the gangsters against the police or the gangster against another. It is a young man with a Mauser against history personal and political, it is revolution one murder at a time. ~ Suketu Mehta

Chatter then will be phatic discourse that has become an end in itself, but sports chatter is something more, a continuous phatic discourse that deceitfully passes itself off as talk of the City and its Ends. Born as the raising to the nth power of that initial (and rational) waste that is sports recreation, sports chatter is the glorification of Waste, and therefore the maximum point of Consumption. On it and in it the consumer civilization man actually consumes himself (and every possibility of thematizing and judging the enforced consumption to which he is invited and subjected). ~ Umberto Eco

Before you ask other people to respect the borders of the West, ask yourself if the West has ever respected anybody else's border. ~ Suketu Mehta

Each person's life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before. ~ Suketu Mehta

We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes, I lived in both of them at the same time. ~ Suketu Mehta

A hit man's character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred. ~ Suketu Mehta

And behind me the highway, circling the city like a concrete snake, waits for us. ~ Rachel Zadok

Joel Lane documents a life we don't quite live, in a city we can't quite find: half glimpsed and half imagined, we know it's out there somewhere. Waiting, maybe. Mixing fear with desire, reputation with regret. Touching the blood-beat of our secret hunger with the rhythms of a music that never felt alien till now. Wasted lives, with never a wasted word. It's an extraordinary achievement: vivid as neon, real as rain. Devastating. ~ Chaz Brenchley

My father was a musician, and I've always loved writing. I grew up in New York City during a time when hip hop music was surrounding you with the hip hop culture, and it felt natural. I was a really huge fan of the music. ~ El-P

When I read it now it's like I have broken into a reality that is not mine, and when I step out of it, as if I had removed my headphones and heard the city again, it is easy to close the door behind me. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it? ~ Olivia Sudjic

If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and spray. The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the floor of the ocean. ~ Peter Ackroyd

To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths store of differently colored, simlarly priced objects. ~ Jonathan Raban

Pray five times a day for peace. Peace in your life, peace in your spirit, peace in your family, peace in your community, in your city but most importantly peace in this world. ~ Cathy Hughes

I fell into a deep sleep tucked in that little cocoon, a deeper sleep than I might of had in years.
Right up until someone kicked me and said Gotcha! ~ James Patterson

I worked at the original Coyote Ugly bar when I was a young, unpublished writer. Then later when I became a writer, I wrote an article about it for GQ. Disney read this article about this filthy, disgusting pit in the East Village [of New York City], where we used to set the bar on fire to get customers away from us, and said, "That's a great movie for kids!" They made the fantastic Coyote Ugly movie, now legendary. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

A tear can be shed in this place on several occasions. Assuming that beauty is the distribution of light in the fashion most congenial to one's retina, a tear is an acknowledgment of the retina's, as well as the tear's, failure to retain beauty. On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. It is the deterioration of the greater speed to the lesser that moistens one's eye. Because one is finite, a departure from this place always feel final; leaving it behind is leaving it forever. For leaving is banishment of the eye to the provinces of the other senses; at best, to the crevices and crevasses of the brain. For the eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. And to the eye, for purely optical reasons, departure is not the body leaving the city but the city abandoning the pupil. Likewise, disappearance of the beloved, especially a gradual one, causes grief no matter who, and for what peripatetic reason, is actually in motion. As the world goes, this city is the eye's beloved. After it, everything is a letdown. A tear is the anticipation of the eye's future. ~ Joseph Brodsky

And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

What a perfect way to end the home stand, by hitting sixty-two for the city of St. Louis and all the fans. I truly wanted to do it here and I did. Thank you St. Louis. ~ Mark McGwire

There's only one movie theater in the entire city of Detroit. The entire city has one open movie theater, and it is in the - it is in the General Motors headquarters complex. ~ Michael Moore

The moment that the state came into conflict with the higher power, the moment that it set itself up as an end in itself, it became identified with Augustine's earthly city and lost all claims to a higher sanction than the law of force and self-interest. Without justice, what is a great kingdom but a great robbery, magnum latrocinium? ~ Christopher Dawson

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life - the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives - as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers. ~ Annie Dillard

I cannot watch the city of Chicago be destroyed by petty politics and bad government. ~ Harold Washington

writing home"

here in the wilderness of australia
writing home becomes easy
in spite of the spreading wild fires
there is less heat, more certainty.

writing home, writing this
i think of those without real homes–
our city, people say, provides houses
which do not, often, bring one home. ~ Kirpal Singh

We say that the sun is behind the clouds, but actually it is not the sun but the city from which we view it that is behind the clouds. If we realized that the sun is never behind the clouds we might have a different attitude toward the whole thing. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

She loved the way her city always sounded like it was celebrating. ~ Sarah Pekkanen

When Marre was two, I was in line at a crowded New York City grocery store, and I gave her a sippy cup of juice in a futile attempt to stop a meltdown. She bellowed at the top of her lungs, "I don't like jews!" Thank God, we live in New York City and my family looks like Hitler's fantasy. Otherwise, that would've been pretty awkward. Jeannie ~ Jim Gaffigan

I think it's my nature to - every time I hear about an award or a nomination, it makes me realize how much I must've been losing before, because I was not aware that every major city had these critics' awards. ~ Jesse Eisenberg

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I went punching every twat and idiot I encounter in this city on a daily basis, I'd have fists as raw as mince. ~ Mary Jennifer Payne