Ashim Shanker Quotes & Sayings

Perhaps, there is no such person who can be called truly free, but only those who can be deemed so by comparison. — Ashim Shanker

He had given himself over to endless wanderings, a life of migration from life-to-life, albeit not necessarily a set of migrations one must view as physical, but rather a set of migrations between circumstances, a set of migrations where the players surrounding him were just as likely to move as he, but nonetheless, a set of migrations calling forth a life unalterable only by its lack of permanence. Along with this came the slow, but dawning realization that he had relinquished his claim over those new memories he could have created alongside the friends and relatives closest to him; and that he had, furthermore, ceased to exist in such people's minds, except as a faint and indistinct silhouette of what he had once been, situated seamlessly against the vivid and oddly memorable backdrops of spaces and moments which shall never be again. — Ashim Shanker

Erudition is the crude residue of wilted harvests; wit: the meddlesome weed that wilts them. — Ashim Shanker

All high mathematics serves to do is to beget higher mathematics. — Ashim Shanker

Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one's most reassuring self-deceptions! — Ashim Shanker

Obligation is a more effective weapon against the Will than any penalty, threat or act of force. — Ashim Shanker

He may actually have been existing in the past and approximating a conceivable future, which brought even the assumption of his immediate perceptions as being in the present into doubt. And thus, he couldn't - beyond a hint of skepticism - say that he truly existed right now and in this moment, but instead it seemed more rational to assume that he simply existed and nothing more. — Ashim Shanker

Writing creatively is a process of self-consumption that requires one to dive deeply inside of oneself with no guarantee of reemergence. — Ashim Shanker

Doubt has become the veritable wellspring of my creative process and my philosophic explorations. It has equipped me with the temerity and wherewithal to question certain truths deemed 'fundamental' by my betters. Defiance has made me stubborn - possibly even arrogant - enough to shrug off rejection and all fears thereof, no matter how lacerating to the self-esteem these could be. It has given me the will to seek only to satisfy myself. — Ashim Shanker

A bracing wind swirls about the boy and alights gently upon his shoulder to gape frightfully at droplets of fate joined infirmly to a sweep of atmospheric and lunar forces far beyond their capabilities to resist. He takes a long, deep breath of air - cleansed through its migration - and he closes his eyes.
Scattered waves roll back in to the sea. — Ashim Shanker

The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception. — Ashim Shanker

The ... act of surrender - or devotion, as the case may be - was, to him, a kind of lifeline for those who sought a quick answer and didn't want to stick around long enough to see their doubt through to its ultimate conclusion. A conclusion, which, of itself, was a bittersweet paradox - for how could doubt simply cease to exist by any stretch of the imagination? Doubt was, nonetheless - from his own perspective - the only inclusive insight into the nature of a Truth exclusive of conditions. — Ashim Shanker

Comfort ... was the key ingredient to making the prisoner crave the prison. — Ashim Shanker

Never miss an opportunity to be truly and deeply humiliated! The shame will carve you down to an individual of exquisite layering, and in the process, etch within you the arcs of exceptional narrative. — Ashim Shanker

Elegance is the perfect disguise for our violent nature - a mask so convincing that we often fool ourselves the moment we don it. — Ashim Shanker

Etchings endure,
But not in Sand
Meanings Collide
To Unresolved Fragments
Codes fizzle to Static
They are not lost
But Unheard
Never lost
Fading slowly to Silence
By infinite degrees — Ashim Shanker

All events of the past withered to mere skeletons, veined and fleshed of fancy. — Ashim Shanker

The temporal heart resonates at whispers
From a Truth overarching
Of whose countenance
Timeless Intellect yearns vainly to fathom — Ashim Shanker

Each form is inadequate, like a graft to be rejected by its intractable and unrelenting host and thus can only serve a brief and momentary purpose coherent to a context rooted in contiguous reason. This unbridled brash Spirit is, to itself, burdensome, yet dynamic, for it sees no flaw in working within the confines of a closed system to achieve ends that extend beyond it. This Spirit is, in fact, self-deceptive for to achieve such ends, it becomes necessary to bound manipulable fragments of the Self with a twine by which these parts can be joined indissolubly and maneuvered adroitly with the skill of a marionettist. — Ashim Shanker

He remembered a version of himself untrammeled by expectation, unimpeded by Ego. He had suffered in the many years since then, seeking to return to that original self, if, in fact, it ever existed. And yet, he was helpless but to regard that unmistakable fear that gripped him in his dream as a sign that his unevenness lent him now to utter incongruity with this specter of past. — Ashim Shanker

Bunnu was no amateur when it came to escape. And even in his drowsiest moments, he understood implicitly that to forget his circumstances, even for a short while, meant first to forget himself. Who he was and why he was - to strip it all bare and start from scratch, as it were. In his nearly 250 years of life and, now, as an old emaciated man completely estranged from his family and closest friends - albeit more by circumstance than by choice - he understood the importance of this process and revered it, for there were far greater things to be done and achieved in the dark, uncertain areas of existence than in those circumscribed - and thereby strained - by comprehensibility. — Ashim Shanker

It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one's life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence. — Ashim Shanker

It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was conceived ... And there can be no other path by which a fiercely competitive, yet social species, as humanity, can afford its members the level of safety, prosperity and stability - such that we enjoy now - without its initial pangs of cannibalism, brutality, dominance and cruelty to forge the foundations, very much like the lava which formed the ground upon which we now stand. Lava still erupts from the core. Brutality, Dominance, and Cruelty similarly erupt from ours; and they are no less prevalent now than in early human history. — Ashim Shanker