“It's not the godsBut our own heartsWe need to fear. The evil starts Against all oddsNot there but here.”

“And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one's son and that one's nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.'Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it.”

“A Word Of ThanksTo these I know a debt past telling:My several muses, harsh and kind;My folks, who stood my sulks and yelling,And (in the long run) did not mind;Dead legislators, whose orationsI've filched to mix my own potations;Indeed, all those whose brains I've pressed,Unmerciful, because obsessed;My own dumb soul, which on a pittanceSurvived to weave this fictive spell;And, gentle reader, you as well,The fountainhead of all remittance.Buy me before good sense insistsYou'll strain your purse and sprain your wrists.”

“Of course, the greater one's need, the greater one's propensity to be mesmerized.”

“I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'm attempting to write. You know,' he continued, extemporizing as he went along, 'first you take one note and explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it's only gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with the beat...and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and finally it all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax.”

“Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out.”

“Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village in this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that leave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.”