“The wife is a man’s half. The wife is the first of friends. The wife is the root of religion, profit, and desire. The wife is the root of salvation. They that have wives can perform religious acts. They that have wives can lead domestic lives. They that have wives have the means to be cheerful. They that have wives can achieve good fortune. Sweet-speeched wives are friends on occasions of joy. They are as fathers on occasions of religious acts. They are mothers in sickness and woe. Even in the deep woods to a traveller a wife is his refreshment and solace. He that hath a wife is trusted by all.” – The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Vol. I, Sambhava Parva of the Adi Parva, trans. Pratap Chandra Roy
Category: Lit & Crit
“By a son one conquereth the three worlds. By a son’s son, one enjoyeth eternity. And by a grandson’s son great-grand-fathers enjoy everlasting happiness.” – The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Vol. I, Sambhava Parva of the Adi Parva, trans. Pratap Chandra Roy
“Sakuntala having worshipped the king according to proper form, told him, ‘This is thy son, O king ! Let him be installed as thy heir-apparent ! O king, this child, like unto a celestial, hath been begotten by thee upon me! Therefore, O best of men, fulfill now the promise thou gavest me! Call to mind, O thou of great good fortune, the agreement thou hadst made on the occasion of thy union with me in the asylum of Kanwa!’ The king, hearing these her words, and remembering everything, said, ‘I do not remember anything. Who art thou, O wicked woman in ascetic guise? I do not remember having any connection with thee in respect of Dharma, Kama and Arthas. Go or stay or do as thou pleasest!’ Thus addressed by him, the fair-coloured innocent one became abashed. Grief deprived her of consciousness and she stood for a time like a wooden post. Soon, however, her eyes became red like copper and her lips began to quiver. And the glances she now and then cast upon the king seemed to burn the latter. Her rising wrath, however, and the fire of her asceticism, she extinguished within herself by an extraordinary effort. Collecting her thoughts in a moment, her heart possessed with sorrow and rage, she thus addressed her lord in anger, looking at him, ‘Knowing everything, O monarch, how canst thou, like an inferior person, thus say that thou knowest it not? Thy heart is a witness to the truth or falsehood of this matter. Therefore, speak truly without degrading thyself! He who being one thing representeth himself as another thing to others, is like a thief and a robber of his own self. Of what sin is he not capable? Thou thinkest that thou alone hast knowledge of thy deed. But knowest thou not that the Ancient, Omniscient one (Narayana) liveth in thy heart ? He knoweth all thy sins, and thou sinnest in His presence! He that sins thinks that none observes him. But he is observed by the gods and by Him also who is in every heart. The Sun, the Moon, the Air, the Fire, the Earth, the Sky, Water, the heart, Yama, the day, the night, both twilights, and Dharma, all witness the acts of man! Yama, the son of Suryya, takes no account of the sins of him with whom Narayana the witness of all acts is gratified! But he with whom Narayana is not gratified is tortured for his sins by Yama! Him who degradeth himself by representing his self falsely, the gods never bless. Even his own soul blesseth him not. I am a wife devoted to my husband. I have come of my own accord, it is true. But do not, on that account, treat me with disrespect. I am thy wife and, therefore, deserve to be treated respectfully!” – The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Vol. I, Sambhava Parva of the Adi Parva, trans. Pratap Chandra Roy
“Women should not live long in the houses of their paternal or maternal relations. Such residence is destructive of their reputation, their good conduct, their virtue.” – The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Vol. I, Sambhava Parva of the Adi Parva, trans. Pratap Chandra Roy
“Remedies certainly exist for all curses, but no remedy can avail those cursed by their mother!” – The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Vol. I, Astika Parva of the Adi Parva, trans. Pratap Chandra Roy
“It is from great foolishness that persons blinded by love of wealth always desire to make a partition of their patrimony. After effecting a partition they fight with each other, deluded by wealth. Then again, enemies in the guise of friends cause estrangements between ignorant and selfish men after they become separated in wealth, and pointing out faults confirm their quarrels, so that the latter soon fall one by one. Absolute ruin very soon overtakes the separated.” – The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Vol. I, Astika Parva of the Adi Parva, trans. Pratap Chandra Roy
“Verily the highest virtue of man is sparing life of others.” – The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Vol. I, Pauloma Parva of the Adi Parva, trans. Pratap Chandra Roy
“The path to the Truth always leads through deception and error. The disparity between error and Truth emerges from the very inner fabrication of the representation itself and not from some external condition or obstacle blocking access to the Truth.” – Lenart Kodre, “Psychoanalysis for anthropology: An introduction to Lacanian anthropology”
“It behoveth thee not to grieve for that which must happen: for who can avert, by his wisdom, the decrees of fate? No one can leave the way marked out for him by Providence. Existence and non-existence, pleasure and pain all have Time for their root. Time createth all things and Time destroyeth all creatures. It is Time that burneth creatures and it is Time that extinguisheth the fire. All states, the good and the evil, in the three worlds, are caused by Time. Time cutteth short all things and createth them anew. Time alone is awake when all things are asleep: indeed, Time is incapable of being overcome. Time passeth over all things without being retarded. Knowing, as thou dost, that all things past and future and all that exist at the present moment, are the offspring of Time, it behoveth thee not to throw away thy reason.” – The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Vol. I, Adi Parva, trans. Pratap Chandra Roy
“Using words to lie destroys language. Using words to cover up lies, however subtly, destroys language. Validating incomprehensible drivel with polite reaction also destroys language. This isn’t merely a question of the prestige of the writing art or the credibility of the journalistic trade: it is about the basic survival of the public sphere.” – Masha Gessen, “The Autocrat’s Language”
“It is important not to equate literature with political protest, otherwise there is a risk of falling into inaction. Yes, the word is already a deed, but it may not be enough. Protest mobilizes people, protest has a very applied and clear pragmatic function, while literature does not have to do all that. Also, literature and its effects are more difficult to predict. Literature offers more room for individual interpretation.” – Daria Serenko, “Fighting Words” (interviewed by Jana Prikryl)
“It’s not the responsibility of literature to offer people support and pleasure. Literature can do that, but it doesn’t have to.” – Daria Serenko, “Fighting Words” (interviewed by Jana Prikryl)
“Whether Creation is thought of as the act of God evoked in Genesis or as the great singularity that has yielded, for our purposes, everything, the moment of Creation never ended. Fiat is always as good a metaphor as any for this stupendous, ongoing burst of energy that sustains itself as it changes, lending charm and strangeness to quarks, giving ingenuity to minds and hands, turning the heads of sunflowers. Anomalous as we seem, we are in the thick of it, together with all being.” – Marilynne Robinson, “Glories Stream from Heaven Afar” (interviewed by Daniel Drake and Lauren Kane)
“It is not to be believed how innocent people are when no one is eavesdropping.” – Elias Canetti, The Earwitness: 50 Characters (trans. Joachim Neugroschel)
“Truly my own body being sickly, brought me easily into a capacity, to know that health was the greatest of all earthly blessings, and truly he was never sick that doth not believe it.” – Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal
“You can’t make sense of yourself without other people. And you can’t make sense of yourself without listening. And you can’t make sense of who you really are without understanding what influences are coming in from where and what circumstances.” – Timothy Snyder, “The Making of Modern Ukraine: Polish Power and Cossack Revolution”
“Are you speaking the language, or is it speaking you?” – Timothy Snyder, “The Making of Modern Ukraine: Before Europe”
“I had made plans to attend a family reunion in California in about a month. I dreamed I saw my grandmother who had died the year before. She was glad to see me and she hugged me and we talked. Then she said, ‘Well, I’ll see you in California.’ I was very taken aback and decided she must not realize she was dead and couldn’t be at the reunion. After a long, awkward pause I said hesitantly, because it seemed rude to point it out, ‘But Grandma, you’re dead.’ She said cheerfully, ‘I know that. You’ll be dead too when you get to California.’ At least partly because of this dream, I cancelled my plans and never went to that reunion.” – Unidentified dreamer, quoted by Deirdre Barrett in “Through a Glass Darkly: Images of the Dead in Dreams”
“What is the point in battering oneself against the bars of one’s cage? To suffer less from the smallness of the gaol, one should stay in the center of it.” – André Gide (as quoted by Julian Jackson in France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944)
“Other possibilities seem more remote the longer you run away from yourself, until the you you now hate has become the sunk cost fallacy that is your daily waking life, and if you change one thing then you’ll have to change another.” – Liza Olson, “The Girls in the Room”
“If we cannot help but blame others for things that are beyond their control, this may be because wretchedness is our basic condition, as inevitable as it is blameworthy, and only an ideology—such as the one that has reigned throughout modernity—that stresses our earthly perfectibility will place the wretched in the earthly purgatories of rehab clinics and ‘correctional institutions’ and psychiatric outpatient clinics, where in each case the purported goal is to purge the wretchedness right out of a person.” – Justin E. H. Smith, “A Surfeit of Black Bile”
“Mitch Hedberg, dead of an overdose at thirty-seven, said of addiction that it is a disease, but a weird one: ‘It’s the only disease people yell at you for having’.” – Justin E. H. Smith, “A Surfeit of Black Bile”
“We say different things for different audiences, whether in intimate dialogue with a loved one, or displayed as a curiosity like the eloquent ape in Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’. This means that at least to some extent all life is a ‘performance’, which we do not have to interpret in any radical way, such as you might have encountered in a graduate seminar in ‘Performance Studies’ at NYU circa 1996. We only need to acknowledge that our encounters in everyday life are not just a matter of showing up, of hauling our body out of domestic storage; these encounters are also a ‘presentation of the self’, which requires at a minimum that a person make choices about how the self is presented, in what light, which angles to showcase, to what ends. It may be that one partially adequate gloss on what it is to be mentally healthy is that this is a state in which the performative quality of quotidian self-presentations retreats into the background, and a person feels as if the self who is coming across to others is naturally and spontaneously the real one (more or less). I can only guess at what that might be like.” – Justin E. H. Smith, “A Surfeit of Black Bile”
“An elderly man was at home, dying in bed. He smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookies baking. He wanted one last cookie before he died. He fell out of bed, crawled to the landing, rolled down the stairs, and crawled into the kitchen where his wife was busily baking cookies. With waning strength he crawled to the table and was just barely able to lift his withered arm to the cookie sheet. As he grasped a warm, moist, chocolate chip cookie, his favorite kind, his wife suddenly whacked his hand with a spatula. ‘Why?’ he whispered. ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘They’re for the funeral,’ she said.” – Mady Schutzman, “Being Approximate: The Ganser Syndrome and Beyond”
“Verbal nonsense (Ganser syndrome) and physical nonsense (buffoonery syndrome) within the realm of medical science are pathologized conditions. Verbal nonsense (as in vaudeville, joking) and physical nonsense (as in slapstick, clowning) within the realm of entertainment (both on and off the stage) are conditions of art.” – Mady Schutzman, “Being Approximate: The Ganser Syndrome and Beyond”
“The more one has experienced, the more there is to be astonished by. Our capacity for wonder grows with experience, becomes more urgent.” – Elias Canetti, “Selected Notes from Hampstead” (trans. John Hargraves)
“Don’t say it’s too late: how can you know you don’t still have thirty years to begin a new life? Don’t say it’s too early: how can you know that you won’t be dead in a month and that other people won’t fashion lives for themselves out of the ruins of yours?” – Elias Canetti, “Selected Notes from Hampstead” (trans. John Hargraves)
“Adhesives: The promises you promise not to break. The forgiveness when you do.” – Beth Kephart, “Love in the Knots of the Coptic Stitch”
“There is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never.” – Truman Capote, The Thanksgiving Visitor (emphasis in original)
“It’s the freaking American way—you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion.” – George Saunders, “Sea Oak”