Jeet Thayil

“Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts , and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender. An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency.”

“How will the ships navigatewithout stars? And then he remembered that the stars weredead, long dead, and the light they shed was not to be trusted,was false, if not an outright lie, and in any case was inadequate,unequal to its task, which was to illuminate the evil that men did.”

“Women are more evolved biologically and emotionally, that’s well knownand it’s obvious. But they confuse sex and the spirit; they don’tseparate. Men, as you know, always separate: they separatetheir human and dog natures.”

“I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay”

“I was a hardworking junkie. Heroin doesn’t affect your brain. It doesn’t touch your thinking. It’s purely physical.”

“We're waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here.”

“Because now there's time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I'll have to stop, these are night-time tales that vanish in the sunlight like vampire dust”

“You've got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke. There's no point taking it seriously because whatever happens, and I mean whatever the fuck, the punch line is the same: you go out horizontally. You see the point? No fucking point.”

“Drugs are a bad habit, so why do it? Because, said Dimple, it isn't the heroin that we're addicted to, it's the drama of the life, the chaos of it, that's the real addiction and we never get over it; and because when you come down to it, the high life, that is, the intoxicated life, is the best of the limited options offered.”

“My religion is no way of knowing me.”