On Female Authors I've Read - 1

When I look back at the books that I have read in last 10 years, which happen to form the bulk of my reading, I realize that I have not read as many female authors as male. It is not that I completely overlooked the works of female writers but the list is smaller in comparison. Perhaps it is because I was never able to take a fancy to the female authors whose work I have read. Therefore, unlike Ruskin Bond, Jose Saramago or Haruki Murakami, whose multiple books form the part of my reading shelf, I hardly possess more than one book of any female author. It is not as if female authors are completely neglected. From the likes of Doris Lessing and Alice Munro to mainstream authors like Elif Shafak and then a number of authors in native Indian Languages, including the likes of Ismat Chugtai, Indira Goswami, Quratulain Haider and Mridula Garg, I have done my bit of reading, though not as extensive as the works of male authors.

In this multi-part blog post, I have decided to recall some of the female authors, and their works, that I have read over the years, with a hope that this exercise will inspire me to read their other works, or perhaps explore other female authors.

I begin with Doris Lessing and Alice Munro, two authors of supreme quality and paragons of storytelling and craft. In Doris Lessing's case, I think I picked the wrong book (The Cleft). Perhaps I should have started with her classic Shikasta, but when I read that there are five books that form the series (Known as Canopus in Argos), I backed off. My plan was to read something else to get familiar with Doris Lessing's style and once I have acquainted myself with it, I will pick the five-part Shikasta. Sadly, The Cleft did not inspire me enough to pick another Doris Lessing book. Not that it was a bad book; the basic idea of reimagining the very start of humankind, and that too from a feministic point of view, was interesting and so was her take on relationship between men and women, something that she attempts to explore from a very primal perspective. Yet, for all its ambition, the novel was not exciting enough. On a side note though, Doris Lessing, who died few years ago, remains itched in my memory for her cute reaction on winning the Nobel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBODHFBZ8k), it just lights you up and brings a smile on your face.

Alice Munro’s was a different case. For last few years, I have been receiving a Murakami book as my birthday gift, my wife well versed about my preferences. The Nobel Prize for literature is usually announced around the same time and for few years running Haruki Murakami’s name has been circulating in media speculation as the frontrunner. However, Murakami has been constantly overlooked in favour of someone else, like it was in 2013 when Canadian author Alice Munro, a master short story teller, won it. Therefore, it was out of curiosity that I picked one of her books, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Interesting name), in Cincinnati. The book has around ten stories, though I have so far managed to read only one. Strangely enough, though I thoroughly enjoyed this story, somehow I never managed to go beyond that one story.

Often when I travel to a particular country, I pick up books of authors from that country. I bought Elif Shafak’s Forty Rules of Love in Istanbul, following the recommendation of the shop owner (His obvious suggestion was Pamuk, but I have already read him before). A quick read in comparison to say The Cleft, and a bestseller in several countries, the book, which keeps switching between modern day America and 13^th century Persia and is high on Sufism, somehow came across as too sweet to me, a bit like Sufi version of Mills and Boons. Especially the narrative set in modern times. Whereas Rumi and his relationship with Shams Tabrizi (who, instead of Rumi, happens to be the central character) makes up for great reading (my inclination towards historical fiction perhaps resulting in the bias), the second narrative come across as superficial and unreal in comparison. A light read, but not good enough to make me an Elif Shafak fan.

In next post, I will list some of the female writers from India and their works that I have read.

The Real Bond :)

A Short Biographical sketch of my favourite writer.

(As published in  "Ruskin Bond." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2011. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Aug. 2011.) 

Born in India to British parents, author Ruskin Bond paints sensitive, colorful portraits of life in his native country to capture the imagination of his young readers. One of India's most noted children's authors, he depicts the many facets of India's natural and social landscape through his simple stories--from a temple near a quiet, rural village or a bazaar in a small provincial town to a narrow city street brimming with buses, bicycles, and the clamor of people. As Bond notes in his Rain in the Mountains: Notes from the Himalayas, "I have been writing in order to sustain the sort of life I like to lead--unhurried, even-paced, sensual, in step with the natural world, most at home with humble people."

A natural storyteller, Bond found that his talent enabled him to make a living away from the more highly industrialized, congested areas of India. Following the philosophy he outlined in "What's Your Dream?," an autobiographical essay from 1982's A Garland of Memories, Bond has found "a room of his own" at Ivy Cottage, a house in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, and has pursued his single dream by dedicating his life to being a storyteller.

Bond had his first success as a writer very early in his career. In fact, he was not even twenty when he published The Room on the Roof, a novel that dealt with growing up in a changing India. When Rusty, the tale's orphaned protagonist, discovers that he is of mixed Indian-English heritage, he decides to strike out on his own and work as a tutor in the town of Dehra Dun. His naive romantic relationship with the mother of his young charge leads to discovery by her alcoholic husband. Rusty is forced to leave the life he has made for himself and move to another city to find a new place in society. Although Helen W. Coonley senses the author's youth--Bond was seventeen when he wrote the novel--and notes in Kliatt that The Room on the Roof incorporates a somewhat immature outlook, she concludes that "though awkward in parts, the book is still fresh and likable." The Room on the Roof was the winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957, an annual award given to a quality work of fiction written by a resident of the British Commonwealth (which then included India) under the age of thirty.

The Room on the Roof made its author something of a celebrity in India, not only because of his young age but because he was able to capture the spirit of the land and its people so sensitively through his fiction. Throughout his twenties Bond continued to write adult novels about his childhood, not turning to writing for children until he had reached his thirties. Since then, he has written numerous stories and poems that capture his nostalgia for the days of his boyhood: the natural beauty and tranquility of his grandparent's home and the close, secure, loving relationships that he experienced with friends and family.

"Bond illustrates his vision of childhood as a carefree age of mischief and joy where the only worries are associated with cricket matches, beetle races, and parental anger at bad report cards," explains Meena Khorana in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers. "In this comfortable and familiar world, there is a sense of security in friendship and the love and guidance of adults." In books such as The Cherry Tree, The Adventures of Rusty, and Getting Granny's Glasses, relationships among friends and family are warmly illustrated through incidents in the lives of each of Bond's youthful characters. The Cherry Tree, for example, is Bond's heartwarming story of six-year-old Rakhi's attempt to grow a cherry tree from a seed. A Publishers Weekly reviewer praises the book as "abound[ing] with quiet wisdom and love of life."

Drama and suspense are often found in Bond's fiction for children. In Flames in the Forest, young Romi finds himself caught in a forest fire. He and another boy must help each other race to the river--along with frightened birds and animals and even an elephant herd--to escape the smoke and flames. The determined Romi and his partner manage to survive the tragedy in a story that Ellen D. Warwick describes in School Library Journal as full of "action, suspense, local color, even a bit of humor."

Angry River is another of Bond's dramatic adventures. The novel features a young girl who has been left alone on her island home while her grandfather takes his dying wife to the hospital. As the river surrounding her island rises, Sita climbs a tree to safety; after the tree is washed downriver by the raging water, she is rescued by the providential appearance of a boy in a boat. "The power and size of the river, the fear and the danger are all present," states a Times Literary Supplement reviewer, "as is the sense of smallness in a vast world. . . . This really is India you feel."

"At the heart of [Bond's] writings is the value placed on simplicity and a selfless attitude toward life," explains Khorana. "Although the stories deal with the pleasures of humble people, their lives are enriched by meaningful experiences and a profound insight into life." Bond himself gains much of his inspiration from his surroundings and develops many of his ideas for children's books on the long walks he takes on the mountains near his home. "My interests (mountains, animals, trees, wild flowers) are embodied in these and other writings," Bond once explained. "I live in the foothills of the Himalayas and my window opens out on the forest and the distant snow-peaks--the highest mountains in the world. . . . I sit here and, inspired by the life of the hill people and the presence of birds and trees, write my stories and poems." Of his preoccupation with the landscape that features so prominently in his work, Bond once explained, "Once you have lived in the mountains, you belong to them and must come back again and again. There is no escape."

http://go.galegroup.com.bib157.bibbaser.dk/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1000010226&v=2.1&u=45gentkomm&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w 

SINGHASAN BATTISI

Ours is a generation that grew up watching TV serials like Vikram Betaal, Dada Dadi ki Kahaniyan and Singhasan Battisi. But now it seems long ago. I faintly remember that Raja Bhoj was played by Vijay Arora but dont recall who played Vikramaditya (was it Arun Govil).
Recently, during my trip to India, I picked the book from a Indian Railway Bookstall. It was like revisiting the past, not that I recalled the stories, but still it was a soothing sense of associated deja vu. Here in this post I list the names of the Thirty Two fairies that relate the story of King Vikramaditya's righteousness, justice and valour as King Bhoj tries to ascend the mystic throne of mighty King Vikramaditya.

1. RatnaManjari
2. Chitralekha
3. Satyabhama
4. Chandrakala
5. Leelavati
6. kaamkandala
   
7. Kaumudi
8. Pushpawati
   
9. Madhumalati
10. Premawati
11. Padmawati
12. Keertiwati
13. Trilochani
14. Trilochana
15. Anoopwati
16. Sundarwati
17. Satyawati
18. Rooprekha
19. Tara
20. Chandrajyoti
21. Anurodhwati
22. Anuprekha
23. Karunawati
24. Chitrakala
25. Jailakshmi
26. Vidhyawati
27. Jagajyoti
28. Manmohini
29. Vaidehi
30. Roopwati
31. Kaushalya
32. Bhanumati

Having listed these names, I should point out that these are not based on the version that I have read. The version I had was one published by Dheeraj Pocket Books and some of the names were missing from this version. On googling around, I came across another list of names; this particular version was published by Manoj Publications and had names of all 32 fairies. However when I tried to compare the names I found that some of them mismatched in sequence, further some of the names which were quoted in one were not to be found in the other. Finally my curiosity and Google power prevailed and I came across the 1920 version of Brijvallabh Hariprasad in Native Opinion Publication. This and several other great works of Indian literature are available on Digital Library of India. I am sure curious readers and Hindi enthusiasts will find this information useful, perhaps someone will also take up the cause and start a Wikipedia Article :)

My Name Is Red - Orhan Pamuk

Well I took a lot of time to finish this, of course not as much as 'Living To Tell The Tale' though. But have to say, one of the best books I have read. The beginning is bit slow but 100 pages into it and you know that you are reading a genuine masterpiece.
I didn't liked 'The White Castle' by Pamuk so was bit apprehensive while picking this up. Perhaps I would have never read any of his book again but then he won the Nobel and I thought well, I should try reading one more of his and I am glad that I did.
This one is a treat, a brilliant account of lives in medieval Turkey, a brilliant insight into the world that seems so distant now. Pamuk is brilliant when he brings about the clash between east and West, between various styles of painting and between various faiths. Intertwining an equally interesting tale, Pamuk gives us a masterful account of Ottoman history along with the awesome description of the art of miniaturing. The style in which the novel is written is also superb and adds to the brilliance of the novel.
This novel has given me enough inspiration to take up Pamuk's other works including 'Black Book' and 'Snow' and yes it has one of my favorite lines; "Poetry is consolation to life's miseries".
A must for everyone who love reading great literature. Following are some of the lines I liked in the novel.

My Name Is Red – Orhan Pamuk

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time.

In this way, by the twelfth year, when I returned to my city at the age of thirty six, I was painfully aware that my beloved’s face had long since escaped me.

After I took care of that pathetic man, wandering the streets of Istanbul for four days was enough to confirm that everyone with a gleam of cleverness in his eye and the shadow of his soul cast across his face was a hidden assassin. Only imbeciles are innocent.

Over time, jealousy becomes an element as indispensable as paint in the life of the master artist.

Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

Now that I’ve reached this age, I know that true respect arises not from the heart, but from the discrete rules and deference.

To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn’t treat it as a career.

For if a lover’s face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

A letter doesn’t communicate by words alone. A letter just like a book can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, “Go on then, read what the letter tell you!” whereas the dull-witted will say, “Go on then, read what he’s written”.

You know how in such situations reasonable people immediately sense that love without hope is simply hopeless, and understanding the limits of the illogical realm of the heart, make a quick end of it by politely declaring, “They didn’t find us suitably matched. That’s just the way it is.”

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

I thereupon thought how easy it was to end a life. My dear God, you’ve given each of us this unbelievable power, but you’ve also made us afraid to exercise it.

The larger and more colorful a city is, the more places there are to hide one’s guilt and sin; the more crowded it is, the more people there are to hide behind. A city’s intellect ought to be measured not by its scholars, libraries, miniaturists, calligraphers and schools, but by the number of crimes insidiously committed on its dark streets over thousands of years.

Poetry is consolation to life’s miseries.

If presented with the opportunity, we would choose to do in the name of a greater goal whatever awful thing we have already prepared to do for the sake of our own miserable gains, for the lust that burns within us or for the love that breaks our hearts.

In situations such as this, as soon as our merciless intellects draw the bitter conclusion that our hearts refuse, the entire body rebels against the mind.

A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds. Once a miniaturist’s artistry enters our soul this way, it becomes the criterion for the beauty of our world.

I was encouraged when I saw he could no longer look me directly in the eye. Magnanimous men, who think themselves better and morally superior to others, cannot look you in the eye when they are embarrassed on your behalf, perhaps because they are contemplating reporting you and abandoning you to a fate of torture and execution.

“The first step is marriage,” I said. “Let’s see to that first. Love comes after marriage. Don’t forget: Marriage douses love’s flame, leaving nothing but a barren and melancholy blackness. Of course, after marriage, love itself will banish anyway; but happiness fills the void. Still, there are those hasty fools who fall in love before marrying and, burning with emotion, exhaust all their feeling, believing love to be the highest goal in life.”

“The truth is contentment. Love and marriage are but a means to obtaining it: a husband, a house, children, a book.”

Maybe you’ve understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness.

Painting brings to life what the mind sees, as a feast for the eyes.

What the eyes sees in the world enters the painting to the degree that it serves the mind.

Consequently, beauty is the eye discovering in our world what the mind already knows.

The memory of the blind exposes the merciless simplicity of life but also deadens its vigor.

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrows.

There are moments in all our lives when we realize, even as we experience them, that we are living through events we will never forget, even long afterward.

There were two types of people in the world: those who were cowed and crushed by their childhood beatings, forever downtrodden because the beating had the desired effect of killing the inner devils; and those fortunate ones for whom the beatings frightened and tamed the devil within without killing him off.

Time doesn’t flow if you don’t dream.

If you stare long enough your mind enters the time of the painting.

It seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.

Seven Nights - Jorge Luis Borges

I recently finished reading the brilliant essays by the great master. Included here are some of my favorable quotes from the book; though I would add that the whole book is a treasure in itself.

Seven Nights – Jorge Luis Borges

In understanding Borges, one should remember that for him, there is no sensible difference between literary and real experience, so when he talks about books and writers, it is like talking of landscapes and journeys.

The Divine Comedy

Chance – except that there is no chance; what we call chance is our ignorance of the complex machinery of causality.

Poetry is, among so many other things, an intonation, an accentuation that is often untranslatable.

Enchantment, as Stevenson said, is one of the special qualities a writer must have. Without enchantment, the rest is useless.

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

There are two lines which confirm this. One is in Homer –or the Greeks whom we call Homer – where he says, in the Odyssey, “The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” The other, much later, is from Mallarme, who repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said: “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarme speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same, the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.

It was forgotten that poetry began by being narrative, that the roots of poetry are the epic, that the epic is the first poetic genre. In the epic there is time: a before, during, and after. All of that is in poetry.

Halfway through the afternoon that day,

As I bid you my habitual goodbye,

A vague dismay at leaving

Made me know that I loved you.

There is something that Dante does not say, but which one feels at a distance from the episode and perhaps gives it its virtue. Dante relates the fate of the two livers with an infinite pity, and we sense that he envies their fate. Paolo and Francesca are in Hell and he will be saved, but they have loved and he never won the love of the women he loved, Beatrice. There is a certain injustice to this, and Dante must feel it as something terrible, now that he is separated from her. In contrast, these two sinners are together. They cannot speak to each other, they turn in the black whirlwind without hope, yet they are together. When she speaks, she says “we”, speaking for the two of them, another form of being together. They are together for eternity; they share Hell - and that, for Dante, must have been a kind of paradise.

Everyone is defined in a single instant of their lives, a moment in which a man encounters his self for always.

God, as Nietzsche would say, is beyond good and evil.

In some tercet of the Commedia he (Dante) says that no one is permitted to know the judgments of Providence. We cannot anticipate them; no one can know who will be saved and who condemned.

Nightmares

DREAMS ARE THE GENUS; nightmares the species.

The study of dreams is particularly difficult, for we cannot examine dreams directly, we can only speak of the memory of dreams. And it is possible that the memory of dreams does not correspond exactly to the dreams themselves.

For the savage and for the child, dreams are episodes of the waking life; for poets and mystics, it is not impossible for all of the waking life to be a dream.

He (Sir Thomas Browne) says that dreams give us an idea of the excellence of the soul, seeing the soul free of the body and engaged in play and dreaming. He thinks that the soul enjoys its freedom. And Addison says effectively that the soul, when it is free from the shackles of the body, imagines, and is able to imagine with a freedom it does not have in waking.

Dreams are an aesthetic work , perhaps the most ancient aesthetic expression. They take a strangely dramatic form. We are, as Addison said, the theater, the spectators, the actors, the story.

The Thousand and One Nights

”What is time? If you don’t ask me, I know; but if you ask me, I don’t know.” – St. Augustine on time.

“Of the operations of the spirit, the least frequent is reason.” – Fenelon.

Perhaps its not worth it to define something we feel instinctively.

Buddhism

As the vast ocean has only one flavor, the flavor of salt, so the flavor of the Law is the flavor of salvation.

In every moment of our lives we are weaving and interweaving. What we weave is not only our will, or acts, our half-dreams, our sleep, our half-waking; we are forever weaving our karma. And when we die, another being will be born who is the heir of that karma.

To live is to be born, grow old, grow sick, die – not to mention the other sorrows, including the one that was, for the Buddha, the most pathetic: not to be with those we love.

We must renounce passion. Suicide does not help, because it is a passionate act. The man who commits suicide remains in the world of dreams. We must reach the understanding that the world is an apparition, a dream; that life is a dream. But we must feel this deeply, having reached it through the exercises of meditation.

What does it mean to reach Nirvana? Simply that our acts no longer cast shadows. While we are in this world we are subject to karma. Everyone of our acts is interwoven into this mental structure called karma. When we have reached Nirvana our acts no longer have shadows; we are free. St. Augustine said that when we are saved we will have no reason to think about good or evil. We will continue to do good, without thinking of it.

Poetry

The Irish pantheist Scotus Erigena, said that the holy scripture contains an infinite number of meanings, and he compared it to the iridescent feathers of a peacock’s tail. Centuries later, a Spanish Kabbalist said that God wrote the scriptures for each one of the men of Israel, that there are as many as Bibles as there are readers of the Bible. This is believable if we consider that the author of the Bible and the author of the destiny of each one of its readers is the same. One may think of these two sentences merely as demonstrations of the Celtic imagination and of the Oriental imagination. But I would venture to say that they are both absolutely correct, not only in regard to the Scriptures but to any book worth rereading.

We say that Spanish is a sonorous language, that English is a language of varied sounds, that Latin has a certain dignity to which all the later languages aspired: we apply aesthetic categories to languages. Erroneously we suppose that language corresponds to that mysterious thing we call reality. The truth is that language is something else.

Bradley said that one of the effects of poetry is that it gives us the impression not of discovering something new but of remembering something that we have forgotten.

If you like the book, fine; if you don’t, don’t read it. The idea of compulsory reading is absurd; it’s only worthwhile to speak of compulsory happiness. I believe that poetry is something one feels. If you don’t feel poetry, if you have no sense of beauty, if a story doesn’t make you want to know what happened next, then the author has not written for you. Put it aside. Literature is rich enough to offer you some other author worthy of your attention whom you will read tomorrow.

This is how I have taught, relying on the aesthetic event, which does not need to be defined. The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

What is the death of a man? With him dies a face that will never occur again, as Pliny observed. Each man has his own unique face, and with him die thousand of events, thousand of memories, all of them too human.

Beauty waits in ambush for us. If we are sensitive, we will feel it in the poetry of all languages.

For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgment. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.

The rose has no why, it flowers because it flowers.

The Kabbalah

Today we think of a book as an instrument for justifying, defending, disputing, explicating, or chronicling a doctrine, but in Antiquity a book was seen only as a substitute for the spoken word. (As per Plato) Books are like statues, they may seem alive, but when you ask them something they do not reply.

Blindness

At that time, I believed that shyness was very important, but now I know that shyness is one of the evils one must try to overcome, that in reality to be shy doesn’t matter – it is like so many other things to which one gives an exaggerated importance.

No one should read self-pity or reproach

Into this statement of the majesty

Of god; who with such splendid irony

Granted me books and blindness at one touch.

When something ends, we must begin something new.

We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

I too have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny – that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

I want to live with myself,

I want to enjoy the good that I owe to heaven,

Alone, without witnesses,

Free of love, of jealousy,

of hate, of hope, of fear.

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end.

Everything near becomes distant. Goethe could be referring not only to twilight but to life. All things go off, leaving us. Old age is probably the supreme solitude – except that the supreme solitude is death. And “everything near becomes distant” also refers to the slow process of blindness, of which I hoped to show, speaking tonight, that it is not a complete misfortune. It is one more instrument among the many – all of them so strange – that fate or chance provide.

Seeing by Jose Saramago

I finished reading Master's masterpiece a few days back. Here are as a part of habit, the collected quotes from the book.

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The genetic code of what, somewhat unthinkingly, we have been content to call human nature, cannot be reduced to the organic helix of deoxyribonucleic acid, or dna, there is much more to be said about it and it has much more to tell us, but human nature is, figuratively speaking, the complementary spiral that we have not yet managed to prise out of kindergarten despite the multitudes of psychologists and analysts from the most diverse schools and with the most diverse abilities who have broken their nails trying to draw its bolts.

Hope is like salt, there’s no nourishment in it, but it gives the bread its savor, for hours and hours.

Human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometime lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.

It is interesting to observe how the meanings of the words change without our noticing, how we often use them to mean precisely the opposite of what they used to mean and which, in a way, like a fading echo, they still continue to mean.

There is nothing like a good argument to release accumulated tension.

Experience has also taught us that when the time comes for them to be acted upon even the most perfect and polished of ideas can fail, whether because of some last minute hiccup, or because of a gap between expectation and reality, or because, at some critical point, the situation got out of control, or because of a thousand other possible reasons that it is not worth our while going into right now and for which we would not have time, it is therefore vital always to have at the ready a replacement or complementary idea, which would prevent, as might well happen in this case, the emergence of a power vacuum, or to use another more alarming expression, of street power, either of which would have disastrous consequences.

Caution and chicken soup never hurt anyone, in good health or bad.

The most common occurrence in this world of ours, in these days of stumbling blindly forward, is to come across men and women mature in years and ripe in prosperity, who, at eighteen, were not just beaming beacons of style, but also, and perhaps above all, bold revolutionaries determined to bring down the system supported by their parents and to replace it, at last, with a fraternal paradise, which, having warmed up and flexed their muscles on any of the many available versions of moderate conservatism, become, in time, pure egotism of the most obscene and reactionary kind. Put less respectfully, these men and these women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are.

Its odd how we spend everyday of our life saying goodbye, saying and hearing others say see you tomorrow, when inevitably, on one of those days, which will be someone’s last, either the person we said it to will no longer be here, or who said it will not.

As my cat would have said, all hours are good for sleeping.

Unknown soldiers do not need the names that they used in life in order to be showered with the right and proper honors, and that’s fine, if that’s what we agree to do, but if these dead, most of them unrecognizable, and two or three of them still unidentified, want anything, it is to be left in peace.

One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

Why do you grovel before my rough boots? / Why do you loosened your perfumed hairs / and treacherously open your soft arms? / I am nothing but a man with coarse hands / and a cold heart / and if, in order to pass, / I had to trample you underfoot / then, as you well know, I would trample you underfoot.

Changing the position of words often changes their meaning, but they, the words, when weighed one by one, continue physically to be exactly what they were.

People get upset and lose their temper and end up saying things they didn’t intend to or hadn’t even thought.

One precaution guarantees the other.

The safest way of categorizing is not by dividing them up into the stupid and the clever, but into the clever and the too clever, with the stupid we can do what we like, with the clever the trick is to get them on our side, whereas the too clever, even when they’re on our side, are still intrinsically dangerous, they cant help it, the oddest thing is that in everything they do, they are constantly warning us to be wary of them, but, generally speaking, we pay no attentions to the warnings and then have to face the consequences.

Sometimes being too close to the centers of decision-making brings on myopia, makes you short sighted.

If you want to be respected, don’t encourage familiarity.

When the birds are quiet, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re on their nests, it’s the calm that conceals the storm, not the other way round, the same thing happens with human conspiracies, the fact that no one mentions them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Knowledge on its own isn’t always enough, whereas with luck and time you can achieve almost anything.

A moment’s folly can ruin a whole career.

He that knows nothing sees nothing.

In a matter of moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave than the last, time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat.

Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.

You can’t be too careful with thoughts, some present themselves to us with a cloying air of false innocence and then, when it’s too late, reveal their true wicked selves.

Dreaming is cheap, it doesn’t cost any money.

When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf, well, I asked myself that question.

Some people manage to stay standing even when they have been knocked down, and you’re one of them.

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On a Stone Raft I float

Ever since I started reading, I mean consciously, i made it a habit that for every book I read, I'll make a note of all the lines I liked in that particular book. I did the same this time while reading the brilliant "The Stone Raft" by Jose Saramago. Written originally in portugese, The Stone Raft is a book that was so different from the works of the various Nobel laureates I have read so far. Devoid on any complexities, the beauty of this book lies in the fact that it is simple and yet so deep. As an indication of what this book is about, I would say this belongs to the same genre as Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. And that brings another point, its ironical that I have to use Coelho as a reference to introduce Saramago when it should be the other way round.

Anyways I am neither a critic nor a reviewer, the purpose of this blog entry is to put down the brilliant lines that I came across while reading the book. I enjoyed them thoroughly and hope everyone else would feel the same.

Tourists who are out and about early are like this, at heart troubled and restless, unable to accept life’s inescapable brevity, late to bed and early to rise does not make one healthy, but it does prolong life.

For something to exist there are two essential conditions, that a man should see it and that he be able to give it a name.

Bad examples have always prospered and borne more fruit than good advice, and who can tell by what rapid means bad example is transmitted.

In the various arts, and above all in that of writing, the shortest distance between two points, even if close to each other, has never been and never will be, nor is it now, what is known as a straight line, never, never, to put it strongly and emphatically in response to any doubts, to silence them once and for all.

Cowardice is worse than an octopus, an octopus can both contract and extend its arms, cowardice can only contract them.

There are people who do not believe in coincidences, when one is constantly discovering coincidences in the world and is beginning to wonder if coincidences are not the very logic of this world.

Clarity and obscurity cast the same shadow and light, obscurity is clear, clarity is obscure, and as for someone being able to say factually and precisely what he feels and thinks, don’t you believe it, not because he doesn’t want to, but because he cannot.

To be jealous of what only appears to exist is a waste of effort.

Priorities of past should not be allowed to hinder the future.

Why bother discussing the reasons, sometimes one is enough, at other times not even lumping them all together will do it, if your own lives haven’t taught you this, too bad for you, and I repeat, lives not life, for we all have several, and fortunately they kill each other off, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to survive.

What count is the moment, we only serve the moment, and moments give us no warning when they’re coming.

A journey only makes sense if you finish it.

Reaching a decision means saying yes or no, the merest whisper on one’s lips, the difficulties come later when one puts the decision into practice, as we learn from human experience, gained with time and patience, with few hopes and even fewer changes.

Wars are like disasters, they never come singly, the first is a trial run to test the ground, the second to improve performance, the third to secure victory, each of them being, according to where you start counting, third, second, and first.

We often hallucinate when we dearly want something, our wise body takes pity on us, simulates within itself the satisfaction of oure desires, that is what dreaming means, If it weren’t so, how we could ever bear this intolerable life.

Real love means keeping no secrets from one’s beloved, the worst comes later when the romance is over and the lover who has confided his secrets regrets having spoken while the beloved abuses his confidence.

Nature is masterly when it comes to composing spectacles attuned to human circumstances.

The potential harmony of things depends on their equilibrium and the time when they occur, not too soon, not too late, which explains why it is so difficult for us to attain perfection.

Men also weep, its nothing to be ashamed of, and weeping only does them good.

Anyone who knows anything about words knows to expect anything from them.

While there’s life, there’s hope, so do not despair.

Governments are only capable and effective at times when there is no real need to put their ability and effectiveness to test.

Each of us sees the world with the eyes he possess, and eyes see what they choose to see, eyes create the world’s diversity and fabricate its wonders.

Dying for the sake of dying is preferable to dying of hunger or some malignant disease.

Courage and fear are the two pans on the scale that oscillate while the pointer remains still, paralyzed by the amazement at the useless invention of emotions and feelings.

Despair, as we all know, is human, there is no evidence in natural history that animals despair. Yet man, inseparable from despair, has become accustomed to living with it, endures it to its extremes.

In moments of crisis indulging the flesh is what best serves the deeper interests of humanity and of human beings, both habitually harassed as they are by morality.

Journeys succeed each other and accumulate like generations, between the grandson you were and the grandfather you will be, what father will you have been. Therefore a journey, however futile, is necessary.

For the strong to brag about their strength in the presence of the weak is a sign of moral perversion.

We all end up where we want to be, its only a question of time and patience, the hare goes faster than the tortoise, perhaps it will arrive first, so long as it does not cross the path of the hunter and his shotgun.

The world is full of coincidences, and if one thing does not coincide with another that happens to be close to it, that is no reason for denying coincidences, all it means is that what is coinciding is not visible.

The wounds of the soul are deep, otherwise they would not be of the soul.

Your questions are false if you already know the answer.

We are probably incapable of filling emptiness, and what we call meaning is no more than a fleeting collection of images that once seemed harmonious, images on which the intelligence tried in panic to introduce reason, order, coherence.

Words become inadequate as we get closer to the frontiers of the inexpressible, we try to say love and the word will not come out, we try to say I want and we say I cannot, we try to utter the final word only to realize that we have gone back to the beginning.

There comes a time when pride has nothing but words.

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