Amit Chaudhuri quotes - page 3

There has been writing for 10 days now. (Amit Chaudhuri)
I think of Ramu. The Ramu I know and the Ramu I'm writing about have become indistinguishable. The same's true of the Bombay I'm recounting from experience and the Bombay I'm assembling through words. This is often how novels begin for me. There's a convergence. I live. Then something prompts me to write. The writing is not about life. It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
The detective embodies, even more than the romantic drifter, rationality; this intriguing and apparent dichotomy pertains to a significant part of Bengali children's literature as well – that ofen, especially in the proliferation of adventure, spy and mystery genres in Bengali in the first half of the twentieth century, children's literature is not so much an escape from the humanist logos of ‘high' literary practice, but a coming to its irreducible possibilities from a different direction. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
... a severe woman with a patient but unprevaricating gaze, who turned out to be Indira Gandhi. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
... the Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
She would sweep the floor – unending expanses, acres and acres of floor – with a short broom called the jhadu, swiping away the dust in an arc with its long tail, which reminded one of the drooping tail of some nameless, exotic bird. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
It's a well-known fact that no novel is taken seriously in India until a good deal of research has gone into it. This stay in the Taj will be my research. Going down the stairs will be research. So will looking out at the sea. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
Abhi, Babla and Sandeep slept like primeval creatures huddled on the island of the bed, close to the horizon, outwaiting the dawn that would bring the first thought to their heads. Their bodies slept with a pure detached love for every moment of sleep. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
I love churches in Bombay...they make me think of shadow. Of footfall on stone. In England, churches preside over their habitat till they're gratuitous. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason. (Amit Chaudhuri)
... what I've tried to allow is for the essay to be a space in which the consciousness which reads poetry or remembers a line of poetry or listens to music or goes for a walk, is also the consciousness that is inflected and threatened and endangered by the political; is also the consciousness that registers and is permeated by the political. That somehow it is not a separate ... consciousness that is hiding behind the facade of the man who remembers a line of poetry or forgets it, but that it is the same consciousness in which these various things are coming in and going out. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
where the noon is a charged battery, and evening's a visionary gloom' ( St Cyril Road, Bombay ) View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
I drifted past heliotropic rubbish-heaps, elderly/white houses.' ( The Bandra Medical Store ) View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
People are much more aware of one another in England, super-aware. They are focused on others in a seemingly detached and abstract way. This was very different from India. In India you could do anything and people would see you but not see you, hear you but not hear you. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
Only drunks stare at statues .... I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
Each view has a history. You sense you're where others have been. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
... "shagging" - a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
An hour's a symbolic duration. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
Fantasists aren't natural readers. They grow restive easily. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
‘Afternoon's the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime ...' (Amit Chaudhuri)
‘... I sensed that Park Street is, essentially (even for the destitute), a place of brief acquaintances and meetings no one has too much time for anyone else, you yourself are part of a web of motivations that are fading and resurrecting – and you must be on the move constantly to be in the street's ebb and flow of traffic.' View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
(Tagore is) 'making a statement of fact, just as the remembered lines from a child's primer (jal pare/pata nare'; rain falls/the leaf trembles) that first drew Tagore to poetry state a fact. Here, Tagore seems to be telling us that no afflatus or elaboration is necessary, because the world is at its most compelling as it is.' View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
‘The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali's appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.' View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
‘The myth of the Pujas is a simple one – full of rural sweetness. ... The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children.' View quote
Amit Chaudhuri