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"We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal."
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"Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes."

"A daughter is a rainbow - a curve of light through scattered mist that lifts the spirit with her prismatic presence. Is a shadow - a reminder of something brilliant ducking out of sight, too easily drawn away. She is an aria, swelling within the concern chamber, an echo reverberating across a miniature sea. She is a secret, whispered, a hint of what we cannot know until it finds us. She is a sliver of her father, a shard of her mother. A daughter is a promise, kept."

"Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you."

"Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us."

"Mrs. Binnie says we throw out more with a spoon than the men can be bringing in with a shovel...Binnie-like. Our men like the good living. And what if we don't be having too much money, Patsy dear? Sure and we do have lashings of things no money could be buying. There'll be enough squeezed out for Cuddles when the time comes. The Good Man Above will be seeing to that."

"My dad and mom did what a lot of parents did at the time. They sacrificed a lot of their life and used a lot of their disposable income to make sure their children were educated."
Explore more quotes by V. S. Naipaul


"In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India."


"Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others."


"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."


"All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there."


"I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years."


"As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are."


"I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost."
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