Jeet Thayil Quotes & Sayings

I was a hardworking junkie. Heroin doesn't affect your brain. It doesn't touch your thinking. It's purely physical. — Jeet Thayil

Women are more evolved biologically and emotionally, that's well known
and it's obvious. But they confuse sex and the spirit; they don't
separate. Men, as you know, always separate: they separate
their human and dog natures. — Jeet Thayil

Drugs are a bad habit, so why do it? Because, said Dimple, it isn't the heroin that we're addicted to, it's the drama of the life, the chaos of it, that's the real addiction and we never get over it; and because when you come down to it, the high life, that is, the intoxicated life, is the best of the limited options offered. — Jeet Thayil

I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay — Jeet Thayil

The world is on fire; time is a bomb.
Ten thousand years are not enough
When so much remains to be done — Jeet Thayil

Come on, a 25-page digression on god? You can't have that kind of thing, cut it out! — Jeet Thayil

We're waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here. — Jeet Thayil

My religion is no way of knowing me. — Jeet Thayil

Because now there's time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I'll have to stop, these are night-time tales that vanish in the sunlight like vampire dust — Jeet Thayil

Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts , and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender. An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency. — Jeet Thayil

All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay. — Jeet Thayil

You've got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke. There's no point taking it seriously because whatever happens, and I mean whatever the fuck, the punch line is the same: you go out horizontally. You see the point? No fucking point. — Jeet Thayil

How will the ships navigate
without stars? And then he remembered that the stars were
dead, long dead, and the light they shed was not to be trusted,
was false, if not an outright lie, and in any case was inadequate,
unequal to its task, which was to illuminate the evil that men did. — Jeet Thayil

Isn't it incredible?, I said.
There was nothing incredible about it, she said.
I thought it was so because I spoke English, because I read books, and because my parents paid for my education and my upkeep. For me everything was surprising, the world was full of wonder, the most random idiotic occurrence was incredible because my luck made it so. For people like her, for the poor, the only incredible thing in the whole world was money and the mysterious ways in which it worked. — Jeet Thayil

He talks in proverbs. There's nothing I can say in reply. — Jeet Thayil

He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did,and as was the case with all addicts,gratification was the important thing. — Jeet Thayil