Manu Joseph

“But then the fate of shy people is that all of their fears usually come true.”

“A man cannot be exactly the way he wants to be and also dream of keeping his wife”

“In this world, it is very hard to escape happiness.” – Unni Chacko”

“What is it about life that even Ousep Chacko believes it is a lottery?”

“The Boy will not be a failure. Mythili knows.She has seen the generations before.The boy will make it.As his father has said,he does not have the option of failure.He will crack atleast one entrance exam,and he will one day have a nice house in a suburb of San Francisco,or in a suburb of a suburb of San Francisco.He will find a cute Tamil Brahmin wife and make her produce two sweet children.He will drive a Toyota Corolla to work.And there,in the conference room of his office,he will tell his small team,with his hands stretched wide in a managerial way,'We must think out of the box”

“It is the misanthrope who alone has clarity.By standing outside the huddles of man,he sees a lot,and what he often sees is the evidence that people are not as smart as dogs think they are.And he wants to see it time and again.In the fog of ambiguities and mysteries,he desperately searches for truths because truth usually shows humanity in a poor light”

“Morality was probably the invention of unattractive men. Whom else does it benefit really”

“Men do things. We can't help it. That's all there is to it. As you will discover in time, the primary choice every man has to make is whether he wants to be himself or if he wants peace.”

“The city is full of terrible actors. That is what historians never say about Madras, it is filled with hams.”

“The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how standard are falling.- Serious Men”

“She was reminded of her mother's prophecy one day before her wedding that - he will go completely mad one day. But he seems so happy she told her mother. Its not only the sad who go mad, my child, its also the happy, her mother said.- Serious Men”

“The end of an ox is beef, the end of a lie is grief.”

“That perilous distance from where the face of any woman would look ugly.”

“Free love,Ayaan knew, is an enchanting place haunted by demented women”

“The fate of every love story, he knew very well, is in the rot of togetherness, or in the misery of separation. Lovers often choose the first with the same illusory wisdom that makes people choose to die later than now.”

“From what Ayyan had heard of the battles of the Brahmins, it would be bloodless but brutal. They would fight like demons armed with nothing more than deceit and ideals - another form of deceit among men from good families.”

“Marriage needed the absurdity of values.”

“From the comfort of distance, [Non resident Indians and Kashmiris] financially and emotionally support ideologies whose consequence they don’t have to face. They are not just a nuisance. As a collective they are dangerous. When men capable of murder receive the affection of engineers and MBAs, it makes them potentially far more lethal.”

“Yes, Yes. Indians were the oldest civilization on Earth, the greatest, the best. And only Indians had culture. Others were all dumb nomads and whores.”

“Operna did not understand this habit of Indian men. If they could letch at her so overtly, they might as well ask her directly who she was. Why did they always turn to someone else and say, 'Wont you introduce us?' It was so pathetic.”

“After riding like a moron all over the place, observes the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.”

“In the twilight that was now the colour of dust, in the fury of horns that was a national language because honking had telegraphic properties..”

“The dedication of passwords was the new fellowship of marriage. To each other, couples had become furtive asterisks”

“And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It's the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother's advice to her son, a father's irrevocable decision, a boy's first foreboding of life.”

“A mysterious character of UFOs is that they are sighted only in the First World,' she said, 'and no alien conquest of Earth begins until the mayor of New York holds an emergency press conference. When Mars attacks, it attacks America.”

“Scientists want to search for alien signals because that's what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ.""Jesus Christ?" Nambodri asked, with a faintly derogatory chuckle."Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine.""I've heard that story.""From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone's house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do.”