Vikram Seth quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Vikram Seth has a lot to say. In this list we present the 24 best Vikram Seth quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
(And check out our page with Vikram Seth quotes per category if you only want to read quotes from a certain category, such as funny, life, love, politics, and more).
Vikram Seth quotes
God save us from people who mean well.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day – one for each namaaz – ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet – towards the house of God in Mecca.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman.
— Vikram Seth
But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they’re bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they’re good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
Well, what do you think? Avanti?””Avanti, ” cries everyone, and, after a few quick re-tunings of our instruments, and re-initialisings of our hearts, we enter the slow theme-and-variations movement.How good it is to pay this quintet, to play it, not to work at it – to play for our own joy, with no need to convey anything to anyone outside our ring of recreation, with no expectation of a future stage, of the too-immediate sop of applause. The quintet exists without us yet cannot exist without us. It sings to us, we sing into it, and somehow, through these little black and white insects clustering along five thin lines, the man who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed speaks into us across land and water and ten generations, and fills us here with sadness, here with amazed delight.
— Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
How rarely these few years, as work keeps up aloof, Or fares, or one thing or another, How we had days to spend under our parents’ roof;Myself, my sister, and my brother.All five of us will die; to reckon from the pastThis flesh and blood is unforgiving.What’s hard is that just one of us will be the lastTo bear it all and go on living.
— Vikram Seth
Wherever his faltering mind, unsteadily wanders, he should restrain itand bring it under self-controlKrishna, the mind is faltering, violent, strong, and stubborn; I find it as difficultto hold as the wind.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
I’ve always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel – or at least the kind of novel I’m attempting to write. You know, ‘ he continued, extemporizing as he went along, ‘first you take one note and explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it’s only gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with the beat…and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and finally it all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day – one for each namaaz – ripple across the globe from longitude to longtigude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet – towards the house of God in Mecca.
— Vikram Seth
What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.
— Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
I walk across the park to her flat. It is over-heated and there is a great deal of pink. This used not to unnerve me. Now when I step into the bathroom I recoil.Pink bath, pink basin, pink toilet, pink bidet, pink tiles, pink wallpaper, pink rug. Brushes, soap, tooth brush, silk flowers, toilet paper: all pink. Even the little foot-operated waste-bin is pale pink. I know this little waste-bin well. Every time I sleep here I wonder what I am doing with my time and hers. She is sixteen years younger than I am. She is not the woman with whom I want to share my life. But, having begun, what we have continues. She wants it to, and I go along with it, through lust and loneliness, I suppose; and laziness, and lack of focus.
— Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one’s son and that one’s nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.’Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
— Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
She had dispersed. She was the garden at Prem Nivas (soon to be entered into the annual Flower Show), she was Veena’s love of music, Pran’s asthma, Maan’s generosity, the survival of some refugees four years ago, the neem leaves that would preserve quilts stored in the great zinc trunks of Prem Nivas, the moulting feather of some pond-heron, a small unrung brass bell, the memory of decency in an indecent time, the temperament of Bhaskar’s great-grandchildren. Indeed, for all the Minsisster of Revenue’s impatience with her, she was his regret.And it was right that she should continue to be so, for he should have treated her better while she lived, the poor, ignorant, grieving fool.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
And sometimes both of them forgot that what they were undergoing amid the clink of cutlery and crockery was a mutual interview that might decide whether or not they would own a common set of those items some time in the whimsical future.
— Vikram Seth
You can’t blame her, ‘ said Amit. ‘After a life so full of tragedy anyone would become hard.”What tragedy?’ asked Mrs. Chatterji.’Well, when she was four, ‘ said Amit, ‘her mother slapped her–it was quite traumatic–and then things went on in that vein. When she was twelve she came in second in an exam…It hardens you.
— Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader’s experience. If it’s a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it’s a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.
— Vikram Seth
In general, questions are fine; you can always seize upon the parts of them that interest you and concentrate on answering those. And one has to remember when answering questions that asking questions isn’t easy either, and for someone who’s quite shy to stand up in an audience to speak takes some courage.
— Vikram Seth
I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
— Vikram Seth
I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I’m enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.
— Vikram Seth
You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally – your ears will know.
— Vikram Seth
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
— Vikram Seth
Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.
— Vikram Seth
Those books of mine that are remunerative – I’m not talking about poetry here – take years to write, and I am never sure they’ll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.
— Vikram Seth
You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
— Vikram Seth
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish