It was her way of saying, "You should kill yourself.
. . . it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side. . . He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.
My advice is precisely the advice my mother gave me. If you believe you have talent, the next thing you must have is determination. If you keep working, keep striving, and try always to move forward a little bit with every job you do, you'll eventually make it. And I believe that!
They say that you can't live by bread alone, but I can live on compliments.
When I came back to India after Harvard Business School, I started as a lawyer and as a trade union leader.
The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.