Rk Narayan Quotes

life is about making right things and going on..

Friendship was another illusion like love, though it did not reach the same mad heights. People pretended that they were friends, when the fact was they were brought together by force of circumstances.

This is my child. I planted it. I saw it grow. I loved it. Don't cut it down...

Certain things acquired an evil complexion if phrased, but remained harmless in the mind.

How can two living entities possessing intelligence and judgement ever be tied together for a lifetime?

It seems to me that we generally do not have a correct measure of our own wisdom.

Do you realize how few ever really understand how fortunate they are in their circumstances?

you threw a stone into a gutter it would only spurt filth in your face.

This education has reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage . . . What about our own roots? . . . I am up against the system, the whole method and approach of a system of education which makes us morons, cultural morons, but efficient clerks for all your business and administration offices.

I came in several times and spoke, but perhaps you were asleep when I thought you were awake.' 'You are very considerate to explain it this way,' Sugreeva said, 'but I was drunk

Staring is half the victory in love.

It is stimulating to live in a society that is not standardized or mechanized, and is free from monotony.

Travelers are an enthusiastic lot. They do not mind any inconvenience as long as they have something to see.

What can we do with a creature who returns to his doom with such a free heart?

But it was like hiding a corpse. I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing in this world can be hidden or suppressed. All such attempts are like holding an umbrella to conceal the sun.

Even when you realize that the one before you is an enemy and must be treated sternly, do not hurt with words.

But you are not my wife. You are a woman who will go to bed with anyone who flatters your antics. That’s

The gods grow jealous of too much contentment anywhere, and they show their displeasure all of a sudden.

Every creature is born with a potential store of violence.

Past is gone, present is going, and tomorrow is day after tomorrow’s yesterday. So why worry about anything? God is in all this.

It’s often said that God made man in His own image, it’s also true that man makes God in his own image.

The unbeaten brat will remain unlearned,

In a world where we are accustomed to rivalries over possession, authority, and borders, and people clashing over the issue, “Ours,” or “Mine, not yours,” it is rather strange to find two people debating whose the kingdom is not, and asserting: “Yours, not mine.

I returned from the village. The house seemed unbearably dull. But I bore it. "There is no escape from loneliness and separation...." I told myself often. "Wife, child, brothers, parents, friends.... We come together only to go apart again. It is one continuous movement. They move away from us as we move away from them. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle and misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false. My mother got away from her parents, my sisters from our house, I and my brother away from each other, my wife was torn away from me, my daughter is going away with my mother, my father has gone away from his father, my earliest friends - where are they? They scatter apart like the droplets of a waterspray. The law of life. No sense in battling against it...." Thus I reconciled myself to this separation with less struggle than before.

The sun set beyond the sea, so says the poet—and when a poet mentions a sea, we have to accept it. No harm in letting a poet describe his vision, no need to question his geography.

It was Monday morning. Swaminathan was reluctant to open his eyes. he considered Monday specially unpleasant in the calendar. After the delicious freedom of Saturday and Sunday, it was difficult to get into the Monday mood of work and discipline. He shuddered at the very thought of school: the dismal yellow building; the fire-eyed Vedanayagam, his class teacher, and headmaster with his thin long cane...

We are a flawed, weak species, he gently reminds us in these pages, focusing his attention, clearly and without sentiment, on those who will stoop low, those who will stop at nothing. What makes us care for such frequently pathetic characters is that they, like most of the rest of us, are strivers, driven by hopes for a slightly better life.

Those who believe in destiny and those who drift without such beliefs are alike the worst among men; only those who act and perform what is right for their station in life are worthy of praise. Man

He then explained his new philosophy, which followed the devastating discovery that Love and Friendship were the veriest illusions. He explained that people married because their sexual appetite had to be satisfied and there must be somebody to manage the house. There was nothing deeper than that in any man and woman relationship.

Seorang perempuan yang sifatnya jahat tidak pantas diperlakukan sebagai seorang perempuan. [Ramayana Mahabharata, hal. 33]

But there is this peculiarity about heat: it appears to affect only those that think of it.

Knowledge, like food, must be taken within limits. You must know only as much as you need, and not more.

You know why I am here?" asked the headmaster. Swaminathan searched for an answer: the headmaster might be there to receive letters from boy's parents; he might be there to flay Ebenzars alive; he might be there to deliver six cuts with his cane every Monday at twelve o'clock. And above all why this question?

A man who preferred to dress like a permanent tourist was just what a guide passionately looked for all his life. You may want to ask why I became a guide or when. I was a guide for the same reason as someone else is a signaler, porter, or guard. It is fated thus. Don’t laugh at my railway associations. The railways got into my blood very early in life. Engines with their tremendous clanging

He(Samuel, known as 'the Pea') was as apprehensive, weak and nervous about things as Swaminathan was. The bond between them was laughter. They were able to see together the same absurdities and incongruities in things. The most trivial and unnoticeable thing to others would tickle them to death.

One often hears of suicide pacts. It seems to me a wonderful solution, like going on a long holiday. We could sit and talk one night perhaps, and sip our glasses of milk, and maybe we should wake up in a trouble-free world. I’d propose it this very minute if I were sure you would keep the pact, but I fear that I may go ahead and you may change your mind at the last second. ‘And have the responsibility of disposing of your body?’ I said, which was the worst thing I could have said.

The Indian novel in English has been around for longer than is generally realized, with the first attempts dating to the middle of the nineteenth century.

I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing in this world can be hidden or suppressed. All such attempts are like holding an umbrella to conceal the sun.

When one is seized with a passion to understand one’s self, one has to leave behind all normal life and habitual modes of thought.

everyone is acting a part all the time, knowingly or unknowingly.

At this moment, let us not forget that my authority has been challenged not by a warrior but by a monkey!

Is there anyone who has conquered the gods and lived continuously in that victory? Sooner or later retribution has always come. Do not be contemptuous of men or monkeys.

Swaminathan had never thought that this story contained a moral. But now he felt that it must have one since the question paper mentioned it.

Then there was Mani, the Mighty Good-For-Nothing. He towered above all the other boys of the class. He seldom brought any books to the class, and never bothered about homework. He came to the class, monopolized the last bench, ans slept bravely. No teacher ever tried to prod him.

Rama glanced at her whenever a beautiful object caught his eye. Every tint of the sky, every shape of a flower or bud, every elegant form of a creeper reminded him of some aspect or other of Sita’s person.

There are no more surprises and shocks in life, so that I watch the flame without agitation. For me the greatest reality is this and nothing else... Nothing else will worry or interest me in life hereafter.

In a few months I was a seasoned guide. I had viewed myself as an amateur guide and a professional shopman, but now gradually I began to think of myself as a part-time shop-keeper and a full-time tourist guide.

Sebutir benih yang bertunas di bawah kaki pohon induknya tetap berada di situ sampai ia dipindahkan..Setiap manusia, kalau sudah tiba saatnya, harus pergi dan mewujudkan potensi masing-masing dengan caranya sendiri. [Ramayana-Mahabharata, hal. 28]

We stood at the window, gazing on a slender, red streak over the eastern rim of the earth. A cool breeze lapped our faces. The boundaries of our personalities suddenly dissolved. It was a moment of rare, immutable joy--a moment for which one feels grateful to Life and Death.

The only trouble was that the scripture master, Mr. Ebenzar, was a fanatic.

If he(Mani) were Swaminathan, he would have closed the whole incident at the beginning by hurling an ink-bottle, if nothing bigger was available, at the teacher.

A film of the novel, called simply Guide, was released in 1965, produced by and starring Dev Anand, directed by Vijay Anand, and with Waheeda Rehman as Rosie

You cannot count on the physical proximity of someone you love, all the time.

if you threw a stone into a gutter it would only spurt filth in your face.

The compartment built to ‘seat 8 passengers; 4 British Troops, or 6 Indian Troops’ now carried only nine.

violence cannot be everlasting. Sooner or later it has to go, if not through wisdom, definitely through decrepitude, which comes on with years, whether one wants it or not.

If we do not accomplish it in time, what has begun with a monkey may not end with a monkey. Next even a swarm of mosquitoes may decide to challenge your authority.

Words have a knack of breeding more words, whereas laughter, a deafening, roaring laughter, has the knack of swallowing everything up.

all causes of rivalry and clash are senseless and so need no defining or explanation ... Don’t ever fight. No cause is worth a clash.

I felt too hurt. I thought that Othello was kindlier to Desdemona.

brinjals

Nothing in this world can be hidden or suppressed. All such attempts are like holding an umbrella to conceal the sun.

By the twelfth day of his fast, Raju himself has become a tourist attraction. Before an enormous crowd and an American television crew, the starving man is helped down to the drought-stricken river to pray:

The next three days I was very busy. My table was placed in the front room of the new house. All my papers and books were arranged neatly. My clothes hung on a peg. The rest of the house was swept and cleaned.

I returned from the village. The house seemed unbearably dull. But I bore it. "There is no escape from loneliness and separation...." I told myself often. "Wife, child, brothers, parents, friends.... We come together only to go apart again. It is one continuous movement. They move away from us as we move away from them. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle and misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false.

This work opens the eyes of the world blinded by ignorance. As the sun dispels darkness, so does Bharata by its exposition of religion, duty, action, contemplation, and so forth. As the full moon by shedding soft light helps the buds of the lotus to open, so this Purana by its exposition expands the human intellect. The lamp of history illumines the ‘whole mansion of the womb of Nature.’ —Vyasa

The most unnecessary lesson however, in my memory as I realize it now, was a Sanskrit lyric, not in praise of God, but defining the perfect woman - it said the perfect woman must work like a slave, advise like a Mantri (Minister), look like Goddess Lakshmi, be patient like Mother Earth and courtesan-like in the bed chamber - this I had to recite on certain days of the week. After the lessons she released me and served food. (Book: Grandmother's Tale in Antaeus #70: Special Fiction Issue)

Rama watched him fall headlong from his chariot face down onto the earth, and that was the end of the great campaign. Now one noticed Ravana’s face aglow with a new quality. Rama’s arrows had burnt off the layers of dross, the anger, conceit, cruelty, lust, and egotism which had encrusted his real self, and now his personality came through in its pristine form—of one who was devout and capable of tremendous attainments. His constant meditation on Rama, although as an adversary, now seemed to bear fruit, as his face shone with serenity and peace.

For all its idyllic charm, and in the joy of companionship of Sita, Rama never lost sight of his main purpose in settling down in this region—he had come here to encounter and destroy the asuras, the fiends who infested this area, causing suffering and hardship to all the good souls who only wanted to be left alone to pursue their spiritual aims in peace. Rama’s whole purpose of incarnation was ultimately to destroy Ravana, the chief of the asuras, abolish fear from the hearts of men and gods, and establish peace, gentleness, and justice in the world.

I am at ease with children, who talk quite freely except when accompanied by their parents. Then it's mum and dad who do all the talking. 'My son studies your book in school,' said one fond mother, proudly exhibiting her ten-year-old. 'He wants your autograph.' 'What's the name of the book you're reading?' I asked. 'Tom Sawyer,' he said promptly. So I signed Mark Twain in his autograph book. He seemed quite happy. A schoolgirl asked me to autograph her maths textbook. 'But I failed in maths,' I said. 'I'm just a story-writer.' 'How much did you get?' 'Four out of a hundred.' She looked at me rather crossly and snatched the book away. I have signed books in the names of Enid Blyton, R.K. Narayan, Ian Botham, Daniel Defoe, Harry Potter and the Swiss Family Robinson. No one seems to mind.   ★

I have signed books in the names of Enid Blyton, R.K. Narayan, Ian Botham, Daniel Defoe, Harry Potter and the Swiss Family Robinson. No one seems to mind.

Raju remained silent. He could not open his lips without provoking admiration. This was a dangerous state of affairs.

Project is a self-contained phrase and may or may not be capable of elaboration.

A seed that sprouts at the foot of its parent tree remains stunted until it is transplanted.

But there are creatures hovering about waiting to disturb every holy undertaking there, who must be overcome in the same manner in the same manner as one has to conquer the five-fold evils (lust, anger, miserliness, egoism, envy) within before one can realize holiness.

Escape was always possible; in every Indian town there was a corner of comparative order and cleanliness in which one could recover and cherish one's self-respect. In India the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore was the most obvious. The colonial mimicry is a special mimicry of an old country without a native aristocracy for a thousand years who has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul; tomorrow it might be Russian or American; today it is English. The Indian lavatory and the Indian kitchen are the visitor's nightmare. The attitude of the foreigner who does not understand the function of the beggar in India and is judging India by the standards of Europe. Physical effort is to be avoided as a degradation. Every man is an island; each man to his function, his private contract with God. This is the realization of the Gita's selfless action. An eastern conception of dignity and function, reposing on symbolic action: this is the dangerous, decayed pragmatism of caste. Symbolic dress, symbolic food, symbolic worship. India deals in symbols, inaction. Inaction arising out of proclaimed function, function out of caste. India, it was said, brought our concealed elements of the personality. It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written. Respect for the past is new in Europe and it was Europe that revealed India's past to India and made its veneration part of Indian nationalism. It is still through European eyes that India looks at her ruins and her art. The virtues of R.K. Narayan are Indian failing magically transmuted. Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life, yet it permitted a unique human development to so many.

I shun all activities and you have none. You have freed yourself from all duties which had been forced on you. And so you need not know what time of the day or what time of the week, or numbers, reckoning of before and after, when and how far; in short you don’t have to know the business of counting, which habit has made us human beings miserable in many ways. We have lost the faculty of appreciating the present living moment. We are always looking forward or backward and waiting for one or sighing for the other, and lose the pleasure of awareness of the moment in which we actually exist.

people only follow their inclinations, and sooner or later find their reward or retribution. That’s the natural law of life,

If you are ready to hate and want to destroy each other, you may find a hundred reasons

You are not likely to understand that I am different from the tiger next door, that I possess a soul within this forbidding exterior. I can think, analyse, judge, remember and do everything that you can do, perhaps with greater subtlety and sense. I lack only the faculty of speech. But

I realized that deep within I was not different from human beings, and I got into their habit myself and never had a moment’s silence or stillness of mind

with a few exceptions here and there, humans have monopolized the attention of fiction writers. Man in his smugness never imagines for a moment that other creatures may also possess ego, values, outlook, and the ability to communicate, though they may be incapable of audible speech.

What you see is my old shell; inside it’s all changed. You can’t share my life.

Of his views on education, he says, ‘My natural aversion to academic education was further strengthened when I came across an essay by Rabindranath Tagore on education. It confirmed my own precocious conclusions on the subject. I liked to be free to read what I please and not be examined at all.’ After

Never use the words beast or brute. They’re ugly words coined by man in his arrogance. The human being thinks all other creatures are “beasts”.

anything may spark off a fight if you are inclined to nurture hatred - only the foolish waste their lives in fighting

Even a moment of jesting with an asura is likely to lead to incalculable evil consequences.

Just as the presence of a little loba (meanness) dries up and disfigures a whole human personality, so does the presence of this monster turn into desert a region which was once fertile.

You are everything to me: a father, leader and guru. What grieves me is that you are about to lose the position which you have attained through so much.

My dear brother, you snatched away a beautiful woman, turning a deaf ear ear to her screams and appeals, and have kept her in her prison all these months.

The television serial's immense popularity set the stage for the violent Hindu nationalist campaigns, in which Rama appeared as Rambo, his delicate features and gentle smile replaced by a muscular mien and grimace, and The Ramayana itself became a central text in the the nationalists' attempt to weld Hinduism's plural traditions into a monotheistic religion.

Even after the participants have vanished, every inch of earth still retains the impress of all that has gone before.

आले, की तो वास सॅन्डलवूडचाच होता. त्यांनी साबणाचा सुगंध दीर्घ श्वासाने भरून घेतला आणि खिशात साबण ठेवून दिला. ‘‘आणखी काही पाहिजे?’’ पोराने विचारले. ‘‘नको. जा,’’ राव म्हणाले अन् मार्केट रोड ओलांडून ते दुसऱ्या बाजूला गेले. राव मग क्रॉस रोडने चेट्टीवार स्टोअर्सच्या पुढे गेले. तो रस्ता नंतर समांतर रस्त्याला लागला होता. तिथेच ते डावीकडे वळले; एका आवेगानेच आणि मग उजव्या गल्लीत. पुन्हा डावीकडे अन् पुन्हा मागे फिरले; पण तिथे

don’t care to bring this Nataraja

When strong men commit crimes, they become heroic deeds?

I really do not mind doing it for everyone, but there are those who neither know nor learn when taught. I feel like kicking them when I come across that type.