Abhi Khosla > Abhi's Quotes

“You know, that’s what happens when you do well in primary school. The teacher tells your parents, ‘With marks like hers, she ought to go there.’ So that’s where I ended up. I went for six years, and I never liked it. All I could think about was getting out. And you know, I’ve got 108 certificates of merit for never having been late or missed a day of school. That’s how much I hated the place. Get it?"

"No, I don’t get it."

"It’s because I hated the place so much. I wasn’t going to let it beat me. If I’d let it get to me once, I’d be finished. I was scared I’d just keep slipping down and down. I’d crawl to school with a temperature of 103. The teacher would ask me if I was sick, but I’d say no. When I left, they gave me certificates for perfect attendance and punctuality—plus a French dictionary. That’s why I’m taking German now. I didn’t want to owe that school anything. I’m not kidding.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“The afternoon deepened, twilight approached, and bluish shadows enveloped the garden.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“He'll take it," the old man said aloud. "God help him to take it."

He did not take it though. He was gone and the old man felt nothing.

"He can't have gone," he said. "Christ knows he can't have gone. He's making a turn. Maybe he has been hooked before and he remembers something of it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man & The Sea

“One by one, the lights of the village switch off. The only remaining illumination comes from behind the thick hospital blinds of Willows. The business of dying keeps different hours from the business of living.”
― Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club

“Many years ago, everybody here would wake early because there was much to do and only so many hours in the day. Now they wake early because there is much to do and only so many days left.”
― Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club

“felt as much as you do when you reach the top of the stairs in the dark and lift your foot onto a step that isn't there.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Forged Coupon

“and had only just recovered from the corrupting influence, the ignorance and narrow-mindedness in which she had been brought up — like someone suddenly emerging from underwater and taking deep, passionate breaths of the fresh air of life.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Forged Coupon

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“The two policemen took me into a small room that smelled of darkness.”
― Albert Camus

“The prosecutor retorted that chance already had a lot of misdeeds on its conscience in this case.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“From what street noises I could hear, I sensed the sweetness of evening coming on.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“By this time the Indian fighting had become like dangerous cattle drives—the tribes were forced into revolt, driven and decimated, and the sad, sullen remnants settled on starvation lands.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“There was real fear mixed up in his love, and the precipitate from the mixing of these two is cruelty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Lee read European history, trying to discern from the filaments of the past some pattern of the future.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“He said this in boldface type, capital letters.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“There's no thing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of a postage stamp.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Sky, earth, and sea were still lying in the ghostly and glassy pallor of daybreak; a fading star was still floating in unreality.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Nothing is more bizarre, more ticklish, than a relationship between two people who know each other only with their eyes—who encounter, observe each other daily, even hourly, never greeting, never speaking, constrained by convention or by caprice to keep acting the indifferent strangers. They experience discomfort and overwrought curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally stifled need to recognize and to exchange, and they especially feel something like a tense mutual esteem. For people love and honor someone so long as they cannot judge him, and yearning is a product of defective knowledge.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“He shoveled the bacon out on a plate and broke eggs in the hot grease and they jumped and fluttered their edges to brown lace and made clucking sounds.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining—small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“But Samuel had put up a laughing wall against natural laws, and Una's death breached his battlements. He became an old man.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Adam looked around at the flowered curtains washed so long that the blossoms were pale. He saw the worn rugs on the floor and the brown path in the linoleum in the hall. And it was all new to him.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The silence grew until it had the weight of age so hard to lift aside.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden