Paradise Lost

From morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer’s day; and with the setting sun
Dropped from the zenith like a falling star.

~John Milton

The God of Small Things

The twins were too young to know that these were only history's henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. 

Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue or deify. 

Men's Needs. 

~Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things

The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably...They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't...In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again. 

~Arundhati Roy

Steal Like An Artist

Don't make excuses for not working--make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now. 

~Austin Kleon

Sleeping on Jupiter

Like fungus that takes birth in warm and wet places, memories ooze from the crevices of your brain: spawned there, living and dying there, unrelated to anything in the world outside, the slime can coat everything until you can't tell the real from the imagined. 

~Anuradha Roy

The God of Small Things

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt. 

~Arundhati Roy

The Camberwell Beauty

For some reason I kept the teapot I had bought in Salisbury to remind me of wasted time. In its humble way it was pretty. 

~V.S. Pritchett

Chocolate Tea

Long after he had gone and the mauby had dripped and dried on her chin, she remained on that spot, trying to put a name to the part of her that had dribbled away beneath the floorboards. 

~Gaylene Gould