Shreyas Raj

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.”
― Clifton Fadiman, Any Number Can Play

“A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays