Varanasi Quotes

When I came to Delhi first and said, "This is not India. And then I was taken to Varanasi and there I loved, loved the culture. It was a beautiful journey. The way the people dressed - even the poorest people, and the fabrics! With vegetable dyes, and I was fascinated by the color.But in the end I loved the men - all in white - so many shades of white. And I said, "What am I going to do? A color collection or a white collection?" I finally did a neutral white collection. ~ Donna Karan

All action is prayer. All trees are desire-fulfilli ng. All water is the Ganga. All land is Varanasi. Love everything. ~ Neem Karoli Baba

For, to be woken up at five in the morning by the devotional treacle of Anup Jalota, Hari Om Sharan and other confectioners, all of them simultaneously droning out from several different cassette players; to be relentlessly assaulted for the rest of the day and most of the night by the alternately over-earnest and insolent voices of Kumar Sanu, Alisha Chinoy, Baba Sehgal singing 'Sexy, Sexy, Sexy', and 'Ladki hai kya re baba', 'Sarkaye leyo khatiya' and other hideous songs; to have them insidiously leak into your memory and become moronic refrains running over and over again in your mind; to have your environment polluted and your day destroyed in this way was to know a deepening rage, an impulse to murder, and, finally, a creeping fear at one's own dangerous level of derangement. It was to understand the perfectly sane people you read about in the papers, who suddenly explode into violence one fine day; it was to conceive a lasting hatred for the perpetrators, rich or poor, of these auditory atrocities. (on why he left Varanasi after a few days) ~ Pankaj Mishra

VARANASI TRAFFIC is shambolic. It's a humbling reminder that the British drive on the left side of the road and we (Indians) drive on what's left of the road. "The traffic is not terrible at all," wrote novelist Geoff Dyer. "It is beyond any idea of terribleness. It is beyond any idea of traffic. ~ Guru Madhavan

Imagine all the sadhus and priests of Varanasi. More than all of their devotion put together, that's how much I loved her. ~ Chetan Bhagat

In this land of the Ganga (Varanasi), there was education of culture. But, more importantly, there was a culture of education. ~ Narendra Modi

[On the cities of Venice and Varanasi]

Everywhere you look there is evidence of the enchantment of decay, of a kind of beauty that can only be revealed by a long, slow fading. ~ Amitav Ghosh

Yoda Sutra # 9 That which is, see you do not; that which you want to see is that which you see. Not seeing, merely projecting, you are. Yoda Sutra # 10 Projecting your fantasies, dreams, expectations on life - stop. Forget that completely. One and single has to be the whole effort, and that is: how to be awake? ~ Phalachandra Varanasi