Quotes from Vikram Chandra

When you're a writer, sometimes you have to spend time poking at a part of yourself that normal, sane people leave alone.

The mark of man is tragedy and the world must know this.

How can hope live in the same words as the most crushing despair?

Words are no match for love.

The world's only all comprehensive theory of imperial conquest: the constipation hypothesis, or the shit-glory affinity.

I am already and always beaten, my love.

In this city, the rich had some room, and the middle class had less, and the poor had none.

The fire had burnt so low that it was only a vague red glow in the night...out of the dark his voice came...

The world is the world... It is you that makes the horror.

The anger on his face slowly vanished... Don't do this. (Listen you miserable bag of wind, you creature who call yourself a god. You have betrayed us. We lose because they are better. We lose because we live in a world of dreams. We lose because we are as children.) My son; says Yama.

A wise man said a long ago, to realize that one is ignorant is the beginning of wisdom.

The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.

Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.' 'Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.' 'When are we happy?' 'When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.' 'What is regret?' 'To realize that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.' 'What is sorrow?' 'To long for the past.' 'What is the highest pleasure?' 'To hear a good story.

What could my mother be to yours? What kin is my father to yours anyway? And how did you and I meet ever? But in love our hearts have mingled like red earth and pouring rain.

Then what in your opinion is a good story?' 'What it's always been, monkey,' Ganesha said. 'One dhansu conflict. Some chaka-chak song and dance. Grief. Love. Love for the lover, love for the mother. Love for the land. Comedy. Terror. One tremendous villain whom we must love also. All the elements properly balanced and mixed together, item after item, like a perfect meal with a dance of tastes. There you have it.

He has asked himself sometimes if solitude is preferable to boredom or betrayal, which seemed to be the inevitable end of all happy love affairs, of all happy marriages. People clung to one another out of fear. K.D. has preferred the integrity of being alone. He was a realist, he is. He has the strength to face death alone.

The future is simple. The future is simple, I can hold it i the palm of my hand; and the present is just a matter of endurance, detachment, and a sense of humor.

So now that began to develop into a full-fledged shouting match of its own, and all in all it was soon a full-scale old-style Bombay tamasha, with people watching from every balcony and window in every building, up and down the road, laughing and giving advice and yelling at each other.

People had stances, they threw out opinions, they made ferocious noises, but decisions were often made in a flurry of competing silences, and what was not said mattered more than what was.

if you want to live in the city you have to think ahead three turns, and look behind a lie to see the truth and then behind that truth to see the lie.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

There is no completeness; nothing endures, nothing lives; there is only change, unreasoning unreasonable; only birth and death repeating the same story each time, yet different; why?' The voice laughed--'Why you know already; look in your hands.

human beings were stupid, they circled round and around and finally came back to where they started, as if pulled back by the steady tug of an inescapable cord. But

We may read the same texts, but the dhvani that manifests within you will be unique. Your beauty will be your own. If you re-read a story that you read 10 years ago, its dhvani within you will be new. Poetr's beauty is infinite.