“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

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