Victual vitality

"Perhaps the ancients were right after all. Delicious food, like beautiful form and melodious sound, is certainly one of the five attributes of the realm of desire."
- Mamang Dai in Legends of Pensam

The myth of 'Pan Asia'

"There is no such thing as an Asian ethos or mode of thinking."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Arriving home...slowly

"…on previous occasions that I have returned home after a long absence…I have hardly noticed such details, and certainly have not invested them with the significance I now do. I think it is the gradualness of my journey that has caused this. With air travel the shock of arrival is more immediate: the family,…the climate all strike with simultaneous impact, so that the mind is bewildered, and the particular implications of small things obscured."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Bamboo song

"Flute music…is at once the most universal and most particular of sounds. There is no culture that does not have its flute…Each has its specific fingering and compass. It weaves its own associations. Yet to hear any flute, it seems to me, to be drawn into the commonality of all mankind, to be moved by music closest in its phrases and sentences to the human voice."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Travelling...and arriving again

"For a person of fundamentally sedentary habits I have been wandering far too long; a continuously wandering life…would drive me crazy. I marvel at those travellers who, out of curiosity or a sense of mission, wander through unfamiliar environments for years on end. It requires an attitude of mind more capable of contentment with the present than my own. My drive to arrive is too strong."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Sino sombreness

"One of the things I have been seriously deprived of [in China] for most of this year is colour."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Fluke phraseology

"Those who don’t know a language properly are often most expressive in it."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

The Tao of water

"In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it."
- Lao Tzu

Thoughts on water

"There is enchantment in flowing water. I sit hypnotised by its beauty – water, the most unifying of the elements, that ties land and sea and air in one living ring. It has a channelled flow, unlike air, and its cycles are vaster, accepting all three states on nature…Tasteless, it accepts all tastes, colourless, all colours, reflecting the sky, refracting the white stones of its bed, dissolving or suspending the soils and minerals over which it flows. "
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Landscapes and latitude

"Everywhere in the world climatic zones are arranged in latutudinal bands. A north-south journey is therefore likely to be much more varied than an east-west journey of the same length. "
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Pecuniary peculiarity

"It is curious how wealth makes some people pleasant by doing away with worry and petty frustration; and how it makes others abominable."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Thoughts in anger

"A mind clouded with rage is fearsome even to itself."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Left, right, and centre

"Dictatorships of the left or right are no less corrupt than democracies… They are, besides, far more arbitrary in their dealings with any person or institution guilty of independent thought or action…"
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Stagnation in a People’s Republic

"Few people want to innovate or invent, when the punishment for being wrong is so disproportionate to the reward for being right."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

When leaning a new language…

"The intake of new lexical information has to be controlled…learning a language is like making mayonnaise: add too much at once and the mixture will separate out."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Flying in water

"I feel ecstatically free in the water, moving in three dimensions…"
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

The chainsmoker: when the tobacco stick fails to give a kick

"When he smokes, he has no special expression on pleasure on his face, any more than most people have when merely breathing."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Too much silence

"I enjoy solitude, but tonight my aloneness oppresses me like the magnified sound of blood beating in my ears."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake