“[Forster] quotes approvingly from this discussion, from The Magic Flute [by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson]"Lord Buddha was your gospel true?""True and False." "What was true in it?""Selflessness and Love." "What false?""Flight from Life.”

“This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.”

“Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.”

“…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith”

“(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?(b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?(c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you---or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life.”

“It was a kiss from the past.”

“A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.”