15 Quotes by Vivek Shanbhag

Silence descended on the house. [....] Amma must have sensed that this was the sort of silence that, left unchallenged, could consume the family from within.

When you have no choice, you have no discontent either.

Amma and i went to each house to tell them we were leaving. They all said, 'Don't forget us. Keep visiting.' At the age I was then, this seemed absurd. i had grown up among them - how was it even possible to forget these people? Now I see what they meant.

Language communicates in terms of what is already know; it chokes up when asked to deal with entirely unprecedented.

Amma and Malati called her a beggar, a whore, and it was clear from the disbelief on her face that she had never been spoken to in such manner. [....] On that day I became convinced that it is the words of women that deeply wound other women.

Appa enjoys our current prosperity with considerable hesitation, as if it were undeserved. He’s given to quoting a proverb that says wealth shouldn’t strike suddenly like a visitation, but instead grow gradually like a tree.

I believe the essence of translation lies in taking what is unsaid in a work from one language to another. Words have memories, a history of their own. There are no two words with exactly the same meaning. To recreate the unspoken in another language, one needs to understand what went into making the original; then one must dismantle it and rebuild it in the other language.

Words, after all, are nothing by themselves. They burst into meaning only in the minds they’ve entered.

The well-being of any household rests on selective acts of blindness and deafness.