102 Quotes by Karan Mahajan

He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities.

Don’t regret things. Look at the present, and pray,” Ayub said. “That’s why I started praying. If you look backwards or forward, you stumble. But prayer keeps you focused on the eternal present.

To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goat – at least you can see a goat being slaughtered.

Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were forty and forty, and they had suffered the defining tragedy of their lives, and so all other competing tragedies were relegated to mere facts of existence.

The best way to describe what he felt would be to say that first he was blind, then he could see everything. This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world that was 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing.

Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present. For every decision there were a million others he could have made. For every India, a Pakistan of possibilities.

Terror is a form of urban planning.

During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism – and of American life? On a day that I don’t spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It’s my main form of social interaction – as it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families.

He had to go to bed every night knowing his world had been destroyed and wake up knowing he must feel the opposite and go on.