The God Of Small Things Quotes
"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid."
"The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation."
"Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates."
"In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone."
"Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers."
"Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age."
"The confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place."
"It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals."
"The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life."
"History's smell. Like old roses on a breeze."
"It's only after Pappachi died that Chacko resigned his job as lecturer at the Madras Christian College."
"Month after month, Chacko’s carefully constructed planes crashed in the slushgreen paddy fields."
"He had a surprisingly high laugh for a man of his size and fatness."
"She hadn’t learned to control her Hopes yet."
"Ammu read to them from Kipling’s Jungle Book."
"The man’s cub is mine, Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed."
"Chacko told Rahel and Estha that Ammu had no Locusts Stand I."
"The hills are alive with the sound of music."
"Anything’s possible in Human Nature. Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."
"She smelled of milk and urine. Chacko marveled at how someone so small and undefined, so vague in her resemblances, could so completely command the attention, the love, the sanity of a grown man."
"Those last few tortured nights before he left her, Chacko would slip out of bed with a torch and look at his sleeping child. To learn her. Imprint her on his memory."
"But Joe was dead now. Killed in a car crash. Dead as a doorknob. A Joe-shaped Hole in the Universe."
"Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinite joy sounded the saddest."
"The only snag in Comrade K. N. M. Pillai’s plans was Velutha. Of all the workers at Paradise Pickles, he was the only card-holding member of the Party."
"She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double."
"People’s feelings are precious. And when you disobey me in Public, everybody gets the wrong impression."
"History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin."
"He is searching for the beast that lives in him."
"If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her, he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win."
"In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't."
"The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again."
"The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul."
"It is his color and his light. It is the vessel into which he pours himself."
"In his abject defeat lies his supreme triumph."
"He had watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV nongazetted officers."
"But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do."
"Faced with the Real World, she clung nervously to old remembered rules, and had no one but herself to rebel against."
"He looked cheerful, as though he was with an imaginary friend whose company he enjoyed."
"A man had twin sons, Pete and Stuart. Pete was an Optimist and Stuart was a Pessimist."
"When Stuart opened his presents he grumbled all morning."
"ìf there’s so much shit around, there has to be a pony somewhere!’"
"Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country."
"She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting, thick-waisted, thick-ankled girl."
"She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic."
"He loved the fact that Margaret Kochamma didn’t cling to him."
"His mother’s adoration of him, yet he despised her for it and punished her in secret ways."
"Margaret Kochamma wrote regularly, giving Chacko news of Sophie Mol."
"Margaret Kochamma was the first female friend he had ever had."
"Ammu had screamed, ‘If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here!’"
"He was walking swiftly now towards the Heart of Darkness."
"His mind, suddenly impossibly old, floated out of his body."
"All that had been in the papers. The Official Version."
"The early morning heat was full of the promise of worse to come."
"The absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all."
"Civilization's fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness."
"Human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience."
"There were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons."
"Two lives. Two children's childhoods. And a history lesson for future offenders."
"He had misunderstood her. The whole thing was a figment of his imagination."