Mindy Kaling
- Why Not Me?
People talk about confidence without ever bringing up hard work. That's a mistake. I know I sound like some sour older spinster on Downton Abbey who has never felt a man's touch and whose heart has turned to stone, but I don't understand how you could have self-confidence if you don't do the work... I have never, ever, ever, met a high confident person and successful person who is not what a movie would call a 'workaholic'. Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it.
Vikram Seth
- A Suitable Boy - Table of Contents - 2
Blood soaks a lane, bullets ricochet; a legislative vixen baits her prey. A baby kicks; a bloodshot Raja yowls. A young man speeds downhill; a father growls. Calcutta simmers in a stew of talk; a cemetery affords a pleasing walk. Beneath the neem the village children play; worn cattle churn the burning earth to clay. A desperate mother ventures to deploy; fair means or foul to net a suitable boy.
Oscar Wilde
- The Importance of Being Earnest
I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
Vikram Seth
- A Suitable Boy - Table of Contents
Browsing through the books, two students meet one day. A mother mopes; a medal melts away. A courtesan sings coolly through the heat; a hopeful lover buys a parakeet. A couple glide down-river in a boat; a mother hears mischief is afloat.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
- The Gene
It is tempting to write the history of technology through products: the wheel; the microscope; the airplane; the Internet. But it is more illuminating to write the history of technology through transitions: linear motion to circular motion; visual space to subvisual space; motion on land to motion on air; physical connectivity to virtual connectivity.
Jhumpa Lahiri
- Unaccustomed Earth
There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.
Rohinton Mistry
- A Fine Balance
You cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones for success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it's all a question of balance.
Atul Gawande
- Complications - About Practice
Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.
Atul Gawande
- Complications
We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.
Atul Gawande
- Better
Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.
Abraham Verghese
- Cutting for Stone
My fingers "run the bowel" looking for holes that a blade or bullet might have created, coil after glistening coil, twenty-three feet of it compacted into such a small space. The gut that has slithered past my fingers like this in the African night would by now reach the Cape of Good Hope, and I have yet to see the ordinary miracles under skin and rib and muscle, visions concealed from their owner. Is there a greater privilege on earth?
Jane Austen
- Persuasion - Wentworth's Letter To Anne
I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this?
Jane Austen
- Persuasion
Who can be in doubt of what followed? When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other's ultimate comfort. This may be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be truth.
Thomas Hardy
- Far From the Madding Crowds
We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.
Olivie Blake
- Modern Romance
If life is a function of choices - which I've come to learn that it is - then don't choose beauty unless you merely want something to look at. Don't assume that the facets of beauty that you see are all that exist underneath. I have been at my least certain, and least secure, and least apt at playing pretend. In the moments my life is its most perfect version, it also looks the least like perfection, because beauty is not goodness, and perfection is a lie.
Jane Austen
- Northanger Abbey
And professing myself moreover convinced that the general's unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.
Habeeb Akande
- A Taste of Honey
According to Greek mythology, when Zeus and Hera went to the hermaphrodite Tiresias in order to determine who experiences more pleasure from sex, men or women, Tiresias responded: if the sum of love's pleasure adds up to ten - nine parts go to women, only one to men.
