Association Of Small Bombs Quotes

When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided.

What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?

Silence is the small man’s only defense.

The best way to describe what he felt would be to say that first he was blind, then he could see everything. This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world that was 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing.

No action is safe from meaning.

Terror is a form of urban planning.

Yes, madam,” he said, with the exceeding politeness of a man who has just imagined raping you.

Divide and rule. It wasn’t just the British toward the Indians but all parents toward their children.

It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life.

Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers.

The roots of shame run deep.

The months and years of struggle were suddenly canceled by three weeks of exercise and some visualization and focus.

He had to go to bed every night knowing his world had been destroyed and wake up knowing he must feel the opposite and go on.

And you know what happens when a bomb goes off? The truth about people comes out. Men leave their children and run away. Shopkeepers push aside wives and try to save their cash. People come and loot the shops. A blast reveals the truth about places. Don't forget what you're doing is noble.

Back in the market, people collapsed, then got up, their hands pressed to their wounds, as if they had smashed eggs against their bodies in hypnotic agreement and were unsure about what to do with the runny, bloody yolk. Most

You've read Gandhi-ji? He said that the two worst classes of human beings are doctors and lawyers. Lawyers because they prolong fights and doctors because they cure the symptoms, not the cause. Doctors don't eliminate disease--they perpetuate the existence of doctors.

Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present.

He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities

Why do the poor refuse to give an accurate picture of their suffering?

Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were forty and forty, and they had suffered the defining tragedy of their lives, and so all other competing tragedies were relegated to mere facts of existence.

There was a contradiction within Vikas, an open wound: though he was fascinated by the poor, good at joshing with them, he was afraid, thanks to his bourgeois background, of being perceived as poor. Poverty equaled failure.

It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life. Poor thing, she’s a widow, they say. She lost her mother when she was ten to cancer. I’ve been immune to all this, he thought.

Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present. For every decision there were a million others he could have made. For every India, a Pakistan of possibilities.

There are no higher values, people in the West say. Live by your own instincts, for yourself, for your own pleasure... In America, you see, you're not supposed to take care of the elderly. You're supposed to look after yourself, chase your dreams. But what happens when you grow old? Will your individualism save you?

there was a long silence before the screams started, as if, even in pain, people watched each other first to see how to act.

they were excited by these bombings in a way that only victims of esoteric, infrequent tragedies are motivated by horrors

Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing

Like men who have failed together, they wanted nothing more than to never see each other again.

To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goat—at least you can see a goat being slaughtered.

Finally, on a windswept, befogged afternoon, the sort in which all of Delhi is wearing a sweater of atmospheric dirt, he went over with the driver to see the Khuranas.

Village people had no central conception of truth or time or even of other people’s memories; they always just played dumb when he told them they’d changed their stories

When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided

Life is fragmentary but dreams are not.

I just remembered something you said when we first talked. That your pain only went away when you started thinking about others.” “Not just that,” Ayub said. “But when I found God.” ________

Ayub had rich, long lashes that throbbed oddly when he was excited. He was a bit like a bulb that hasn’t quite learned to hoard all its electricity into light and so emits it through twitches—

Don’t regret things. Look at the present, and pray,” Ayub said. “That’s why I started praying. If you look backwards or forward, you stumble. But prayer keeps you focused on the eternal present.

But there was no sign of the bomb in the market. Like all other tragedies, it had been covered up; the market had gone into a huddle of concrete and commerce around the blast, paving over the scars like a jungle coming back over a burnt field

And you know what happens when a bomb goes off? The truth about people comes out. Men leave their children and run away. Shopkeepers push aside wives and try to save their cash. People come and loot the shops. A blast reveals the truth about places.

He was a person who thrived on company, who desired camaraderie, even in its lowest, most base form; he felt that just seeing other people, no matter the circumstances, even if the people were enemies, filled you with health, gave you a reason to live

It didn’t stop—the confusion, the disintegration. Deepa, characterized by her bright, chirpy alertness, was now inert. When they’d come back from meeting Malik Aziz, Vikas had feared she might kill herself, and for a few days he’d stayed home, keeping her under intense watch, with Rajat and his friends making repeated visits. But he saw now what had happened to her was far worse, the mind vacating itself before the body could even act.

Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle’s movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. “They’re so joyless,” he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle’s sensibility had been even before the blast—it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself. “But they are very acclaimed,” his mother had said reverently.

Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle’s movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. “They’re so joyless,” he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle’s sensibility had been even before the blast—it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself. “But they are very acclaimed,” his mother had said reverently. ________

They’d been sleeping on the floor next to the bed ever since the boys had died. This was because the boys, though they were eleven and thirteen, coming into their male sounds and snores, had shared the bed with them every night, the limbs of the four Khuranas tangled ferociously, like a sprig of roots, dreams and sleep patterns merging and helixing, so that on one particular night, when Nakul screamed in his sleep, so did the other three, and the family woke with a common hoarse throat, looking around for intruders and then laughing. “We’re like tightly packed molecules,” Tushar had said, invoking the words of his science teacher and squeezing his mother close.

he was regularly derided by the others as being effeminate, confused, contradictory, ineffectual, and eccentric.

such a nugatory, ascetic path

it was important to remember in order to keep the past from repeating itself;

More important, a blast was a political tragedy, an act of war, in which people perished not because of their own mistakes but because of the mistakes of the government.

They should kill everyone in the Taliban,” Deepa had said, sitting under two garlanded portraits of Tushar and Nakul. “Every single one.” Vikas had added, “When we see what is happening in the West, we are glad. We are glad George Bush is going after terrorists. It should be a lesson to our country. We’ve been passive people too long. But this passivity and ignorance doesn’t work before terrorism.

He had never lost his urge for classification—this tyrant’s urge for unity and separation. He knew everyone was different, yet he wanted them to be the same. Hence his obsession with death.

Life was an endless parade of tragedies: solve one thing and another rushes to take its place.

Most men think in years and days. Allow a few of us to think in eons. Spare us.

The body itself was abhorrent. It could be made subservient to anything. It could work for despots, tyrants, fascists, terrorists—it could work for machines. He realized the pointlessness, at a time like this, of having a mind.

You turn into what you hate,

Inside him, in a broth of blood and water, organs bumped softly, organically into one another, like fish in an aquarium.

Growing up in Delhi, one gets addicted to pollution.

What has she got? Nothing but years and years of heartbreak, of being pushed physically, I am sure, into the country of her mother’s cancer. When she married me, with my encouraging smile and my famous family, she probably thought she was gaining security—exactly the thing she craved after that tiny lifeboat of a family in Bangalore. Instead she got the opposite. Or not the opposite—just a continuation of her childhood. Secretly we are all looking for ways to continue our childhoods—the hurt, the pain, the love, the fear, the shame. So just as I recognized in her someone who would let me carry on with my bitterness, she must have recognized in me someone who would let her down repeatedly. Lead her straight into the waltzing, frizzing arms of cancer.

He had read that the only way to endure solitary confinement—if that was your sentence—was to retreat into your own memories, to open and reread the books stocked in the library of your mind.

It was only after some years when I realized that my pain was psychological and that I was holding on to it because I was addicted to it that it went away. It was only when I started praying and not thinking of myself that it went away. When I gave myself to Allah.

Do something else? But there was nothing else for people of his generation to do! They were hooked to machines. Everywhere one turned one encountered screens, keyboards, wires.

Why had they been so irresponsible—with him in particular? But Indians were like that, happy to be puppets of fate. “Chalta hai.” “It’s in God’s hands.” “Everything goes.

The Religion of Pain. The book said straightforward things. Pain was a response to injury. But when pain didn’t go away it was because a deep-seated psychological pattern had been established; besides, back pain hadn’t existed till fifty years before—before that, people got ulcers when they were depressed; where were ulcers now? Replaced by back pain.

You’ve read Gandhi-ji? He said that the two worst classes of human beings were doctors and lawyers. Lawyers because they prolong fights and doctors because they cure the symptoms, not the cause.

He had come to see that people were blind to tragedy till they experienced it firsthand, and that they were willing to risk the unknown if it meant they could make money in the interim. This was the case not just with small Indian markets, with their reluctance to secure themselves, but with the U.S. as well: Airlines had known for years about the danger of hijackings, but had lobbied against security because it cost time and money to process passengers. Better to let a plane be occasionally hurled off track, the heads of the airlines reasoned, than to hemorrhage money in the terminals.

If religious fascisms are possible, one must address the potential—supreme irony—for fascism in Israel. Israeli reactions to the first and second intifada have been mixed. Israeli national identity has been powerfully associated with an affirmation of the human rights that were long denied to Jews in the Diaspora. This democratic tradition forms a barrier against “giving up free institutions” in the fight against Palestinian nationalism. It has been weakened, however, by two trends—the inevitable hardening of attitudes in the face of Palestinian intransigence, and a shift of weight within the Israeli population away from European Jews, the principal bearers of the democratic tradition, in favor of Jews from North Africa and elsewhere in the Near East who are indifferent to it. The suicide bombings of the second intifada after 2001 radicalized even many Israeli democrats to the right. By 2002, it was possible to hear language within the right wing of the Likud Party and some of the small religious parties that comes close to a functional equivalent to fascism. The chosen people begins to sound like a Master Race that claims a unique “mission in the world,” demands its “vital space,” demonizes an enemy that obstructs the realization of the people’s destiny, and accepts the necessity of force to obtain these ends.