Read: "Wisdom from books: Jerry Pinto picks his favourite literary quotes from a year of reading"
Vivek Pinto
‘In the world, I thought, there are so many voices and so many echoes.’
Some years ago, the good folks at the Study Centre for Indian Literature and Translation at the American College in Madurai agreed to take my papers. And as I began to send them, I found old diaries and into those diaries, I would copy out passages that struck me as wise or beautiful and often both. I wondered when I had stopped doing this; and then wondered whether I could not start again.
I decided also that I would copy out the lines I thought were important to me. My friend the painter Mehlli Gobhai filled endless notebooks with quotations and excerpts from art journals and magazines. So did my other friend the poet Adil Jussawalla.
Here then is some of the wisdom from a year’s crop of books. I have resisted the desire to annotate them. Let them stand or fall for you on their own.
…the goat owned in common dies of hunger.
— ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ by Chinua Achebe.
Evil does not reach its perfect state simply by being committed. It is at least as important that it be wrongly named, since this guarantees that the mind cannot come to see it clear and whole, so long ass this state of affairs persists the evil can safely elude a judgment that sees it for what it was.
— ‘The Book of All Books’ by Roberto Calasso as translated by Tim Parks.
“I would write and tear it up, write and tear it up,” he says.
— Premchand as quoted by Sara Rai in ‘Burnt Umber’.
“He produced the impression of keeping copies of everything he said.”
— ‘The Enchanted April’ by Elizabeth von Arnheim.
“Hating evil’s just another hate.”
— ‘Soliloquies’ by Adil Jussawalla.
“It’s not the hardest punch that kills you, Torres tells us, it’s the one you didn’t see coming.”
— ‘The Distance’ by Ivan Vladislavic quoting Jose Torres in Sting Like a Bee who is referring to Muhammad Ali.
“Unless is the worry word of the English language.”
— ‘Unless’ by Carol Shields.
“I’d read about names in the Sami tradition, that besides having a word bestowed on them for a name they were often given a brief snatch of melody too, their own personal joik, whose particular tone and clang sai something about the person they belonged to, his or her character.”
— ‘The Pastor’ by Hanne Ørstavik translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken.
“In the world, I thought, there are so many voices and so many echoes.”
— Maurice Gee in ‘Plumb’.
“Towns can be burned down; bishops cannot.”
— ‘The Impostor’ by Jean Cocteau as translated by Dorothy Williams.
“Everyone has a monkey on his left shoulder and a parrot on his right.”
— Ibid
“In God we trust. All others bring data.”
— NASA slogan quoted by David Epstein in ‘Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World’.
“A garden, no matter how good it is must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying one – Paradise – but after a while the owner and occupants wanted more.
— From the essay, ‘The Garden I Have in Mind’ by Jamaica Kincaid, In ‘The Garden: Essays on Nature & Growing’, no editor mentioned, so the elves and gnomes at Daunt books probably put it together.
“Her heart was but a small lamp.”
— ‘Ittehad’ by Guli Sadarangani translated by Rita Kothari.
“…reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences.”
— From ‘Antwerp’ by Roberto Bolaňo translated by Natasha Wimmer.
“Good fortune is a burden that oppresses the happy man, because it is no more than a particular state of mind.”
— ‘The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis’ by José Saramago as translated by Giovanni Pontiero.
“…it is always wise to remember, while it is true that it is man who proposes, it is God who disposesa and there have been very few occasions, almost all of them tragic, when both Man and God were in agreement and did all the disposing together.”
— ‘Seeing’ by José Saramago as translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
“It was an odd friendship but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.”
— ‘Parade’s End’ by Ford Madox Ford.
“There are more people with mental and emotional disorders in prisons than in mental institutions.”
— Angela Davis in ‘Are Prisons Obsolete?’
“If you need an explanation for your behaviour, then it isn’t innocent.”
— AN Wilson in ‘Love Unknown’.
“When we carefully scrutinise what other people think of us, we come to the somewhat disappointing but not altogether unwholesome conclusion, that the belief in the extreme superiority of our Western civilisation really only exists in the Western mind itself.”
— William Rivers, an early anthropologist, quoted by Lucy Moore: ‘In Search of Us: Twelve Adventures in Anthropology’.
“The nature of our nature is not to be constrained by our nature.”
— Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology and biology at Stanford, quoted in Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté in ‘The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.’
“Pity’s the most cruel trap ever invented. To take pity on you, I have to first cast us in unequal roles, looking down on your misfortune from some imagined perch. Even if there is an actual power gap between us in the world – say one born of a racial or economic hierarchy – treating it as if it is a permanent essential fact about us does neither of us any favours.”
— Said by the poet Jason Otter to Wolf Solent in ‘Wolf Solent’ by John Cowper Powys.
“The writer’s dilemma. Be scarred enough to be a good writer, but not so scarred as to be truly fucked up.”
— Viet Thanh Nguyen in ‘A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial.’
“Most immigrants learned their English [in Toronto] from recorded songs, or until the talkies came, through mimicking actors on stage.”
— ‘In the Skin of a Lion’ by Michael Ondaatje.
“As long as the dying live, the living do not spare them.”
— John Updike in ‘Gertrude and Claudius’.
“But a time comes when there are more important things than books.”
— ‘Foe’ by JM Coetzee.
“A man can also have a female gaze.”
— Aparna Sen in ‘The Worlds of Aparna’ by Suman Ghosh.
“In the art and course of writing stories, there are two of the springs, one bright [independence] and one dark [guilt], that feed the stream.”
— Eudora Welty in ‘One Writer’s Beginnings’.
“To know and not to act is not yet to know.”
— Wang Yang-Ming quoted by Isao in ‘Runaway Horses’ by Yukio Mishima as translated by Michael Gallagher.
Brian Desouza
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