Quotes from Ruskin Bond

The outskirts of an Indian village are a great place for birds. You will see twenty to thirty species in the course of a day. Bluejays doing their acrobatics, sky-diving high above the open fields; cheeky bulbuls in the courtyard; seven sisters everywhere; mynas quarrelling on the verandah steps; scarlet minivets and rosy pastors in the banyan tree; and at night, the hawk cuckoo or brain fever bird shouting at us from the mango-tope.

they will take you back to a time when life was not so full of care and there was time to stand and stare. But not for too long, or the train would leave without you!

There are better things to do with our time on this earth.

if you have secrets, you must have a friend to share them with, a companion of one's own age.

It would be a dull world if it was the same everywhere,' said my father.

peacocks flew.

Ranji had a one-rupee coin. He'd had it since morning, and now it was afternoon - and that was far too long to keep a rupee. It was time he spend the money, or some of it, or most of it.

Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man's last romance.' And

there's no harm in indulging in a little nostalgia. What is nostalgia, after all, but an attempt to preserve that which was good in the past?

Outside the towns in the isolation of the hills, life is simply a matter of yesterday, today and tomorrow. And not always tomorrow.

When God, the great mathematician, discovered that in making man he had overdone things a bit, he created the bedbug to even things out. Soon

In spite of these hazards, a letter sent by dak runner used to take twelve days to reach Meerut from Calcutta. It takes about the same time today, unless you use speed-post.

Mussoorie has its woman in white. Late at night, she can be seen sitting on the parapet wall on the winding road up to the hill-station. Don't stop to offer her a lift. She will fix you with her evil eye and ruin your holiday. The

Sometimes, if you are lucky, you will see the moon coming up, and two distant deodars in perfect silhouette.

Well, it often happens that people with good eyesight fail to see what is right in front of them. They have too much to take in, I suppose. Whereas people who cannot see (or see very little) have to take in only the essentials, whatever registers tellingly on their remaining senses.

The best kind of walk, and this applies to the plains as well as to the hills, is the one in which you have no particular destination when you set out. 'Where

Apathy, or lethargy, or a combination of the two, soon casts a spell over everything and the most traumatic events are quickly forgotten.

I have written about moonlight bathing the Taj and the sun beating down on the Coromandel coast—and so have others—but who will celebrate little Fosterganj? And so I decided to write this account of the friends I made there—a baker, a banker, a pickpocket, a hare-lipped youth, an old boozer of royal descent, and a few others—to remind myself that there had been such a place, and that it had once been a part of my life.

The kindest people are often those who have come through testing personal tragedies.

Ah, those picnics! They seem to be a thing of the past, now that you can drive almost anywhere and find a line of dhabas awaiting you. Few people today bother to prepare those delicate sandwiches or delicious parathas when packets of potato chips and other fast foods are to be found at every bend of the road.

I sat in a teashop, tasted my teeth on an old bun, and washed it down with milky tea. The bun had been around for some time, but so had I, so we were quits. At the age of forty I could digest almost anything.

Sometimes I think small children are the only sacred things left on this earth. Children and flowers.

Death moves about at random, without discriminating between the innocent and the evil, the poor and the rich.

Give me a companion of my way, be it only to mention how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines,' wrote Hazlitt. Pratap