Amit Chaudhuri Quotes

There was a difference between his parents with regard to appliances; his father distrusted them as he would a rival; his mother had no confidence in using them, but none the less desired them.

This morning he'd discovered the bathroom light on, its lustre wasted in daylight.

It never became so dark in the room in Claremont; some light, inquisitive and worldly, always entered through the curtains

‘... the menu’s a delirious poem/on which the names of Moghlai and Punjabi and Parsi/

This second time round, she'd discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.

I'm uncomfortable beginning at the beginning. It's not because I'm clever, but because it's a difficult thing, writing.

... what I've tried to allow is for the essay to be a space in which the consciousness which reads poetry or remembers a line of poetry or listens to music or goes for a walk, is also the consciousness that is inflected and threatened and endangered by the political; is also the consciousness that registers and is permeated by the political. That somehow it is not a separate ... consciousness that is hiding behind the facade of the man who remembers a line of poetry or forgets it, but that it is the same consciousness in which these various things are coming in and going out.

These small freshwater fish

In the oldest, bunched houses with tottering stairs,

‘And the old homelovingness/of light falling and touching the black/utensils ...’ ( Kitchen )

‘a speck of dust hanging/in a vertical wall of light.’ ( Letter from the Hills )

‘As the sun came up, we/saw the leaves peer out, shivering.’ ( Letter from the Hills )

‘To the far left, above your shoulder’s gentle/curve, like golden pods, the sodium vapour/lights in the naval dockyard ... And before us,/a continuous, unreal flare of fire defined/the horizon’s extremity, a stain on a brow.’ ( The Steamer )

‘Light shafted obliquely on it.’ ( The Steamer )

‘Never to have lived is best. And the second best/is to grow old with the morning into/afternoon, and then to evening, when sundry shadows and gestures marry/like the vanished divisions of a shut fan.’ ( St Cyril Road Sequence )