"Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. Also, uh-huh, not knowing what you're doing - separating deeds from the words that define them - was apparently becoming an acceptable excuse. To say "I didn't mean it" was to erase meaning from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved ALis of the world. Could that be so? Obviously, no. No, it simply could not. Many people would say that even a genuine act of repentance could not atone for a crime, much less this unexplained blankness - an infinitely lesser excuse, a mere assertion of ignorance that wouldn't even register on any scale of regret."

"From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable."

"So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name.The problem's name is God."

"Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch."

"No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time."

"There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the past ceases to exist."

"If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent."

"I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk."

"For to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy."

"All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent. The bazaar of conflicting was the place where freedom rang."

"Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?"

"Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family."

"In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects."

"Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit."

"I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more."

"What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?"

"Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours."

"When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible."

"Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment."

"Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all."

"It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind."

"Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory."

"This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone."

"She has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages . . ."

"Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie."

"Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms."

"Forget the soul. No such ghost in the machine. What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind."

"Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death."

"From birds she learned how to sing, from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence."

"I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods."

"It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions."

"When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear."

"All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not udnerstand the idea of as tory. The dungeon was static, eternal, black and a story needed motion adn tiem and light. He felt his story slipping away from him, beocming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He has no story. There was no story. He was not a man. There was no man here. There was only the dungeon, and the slithering dark."

"As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper."

"Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy."