Jerry Pinto Quotes & Sayings

He was a natural Protestant when I met him.", Em would say. "He protested everything. — Jerry Pinto

We began our hospital visits: one day Susan, one day me, everyday The Big Hoom. On one of these visits, she told me about the tap that opened at my birth and the lack drip filling her up, and it tore a hole in my heart. If this was what she could manage with a single sentence, what did thirsty years of marriage do to The Big Hoom? — Jerry Pinto

It is like oil. Like molasses, slow at first.Then one morning I woke up and it was flowing free and fast. I thought I would drown in it. I thought it would drown little you and Susan. I got up, got dressed and went out onto the road and tried to jump in front of a bus. I thought it would be a final thing, quick like a bang. Only , it wasn't. — Jerry Pinto

She was in ward 33 again, lying in bed, a bed with a dark green sheet and a view of the outside. We could both see a man and woman getting out of a taxi. They were young and stood for a while, as if hesitating, in front of the hospital. Then the man took the woman's hand and they walked into the hospital and we lost them.

'That's why Indian women fall ill,' Em said. 'So that their husbands will hold their hands. — Jerry Pinto

Because the sky is so high and the crow shat in your left eye. I could tell you a lie but I don't see why. The world is a game and the game is a tie. The tie is around your neck and they'll string you high. — Jerry Pinto

I know I want to marry you. But I wish we were the first to ever get married. I cannot help feeling that the institution has been somewhat corrupted and corroded by the misuse of others. We could show them, by a beyootiful and myoochooal respect for each other, how things must be conducted.
Have I ever told you how much I love you? Well, darling, I am telling you now ... — Jerry Pinto

Once I was told that living with me would mean being trapped and slowly asphyxiated. — Jerry Pinto

I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization. — Jerry Pinto

I wasn't sure I would ever be able to deal with the world. It seemed too big and demanding and there was no fixed syllabus. — Jerry Pinto

Was there a drain?'
'No. There was no drain. There isn't one even now'. — Jerry Pinto

She had forgotten, and the world was lying askew around — Jerry Pinto

I wanted to understand her predicament because I was her son and I loved her with a helpless corroded love. — Jerry Pinto

One day I told him about the boys of the neighborhood, about their mocking.
He said, "That's because they don't understand."
"They should understand, I said. I didn't want to cry, but I was crying.
"If your mother had diabetes, what would they say?"
"I don't know."
"This is like diabetes. She's not well. That's all."
Was that what he told himself? That she was not well? That she might get better? I don't know. — Jerry Pinto

Honestly.I don't understand Zen.It seems if you don't answer properly,or if you are rude,people get enlightened. — Jerry Pinto

Dear Imelda, In accordance with your wishes, I did not imagine you smiling. I did not smile myself. But I am willing to take my chances. Your body is yours to give or not. Should you decide not, I will respect that, although I must warn you that I will work hard to reverse your decision. Let me say, though, that I find all the signs most encouraging. Shall we go forward then? Love, Augustine. — Jerry Pinto

One thing,' he said. 'If you want to get people to talk to you, you should never interrupt.' 'Never? Even if I think something is wrong or missing?' 'Especially if you think something is wrong or missing.' 'Why?' 'Stops them. Gives them time to think. Interrupts the flow. If you want to get more, you shut up and wait.' And — Jerry Pinto

In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is supposed to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously. — Jerry Pinto

Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again. — Jerry Pinto

You didn't want children?' I don't remember who said this, Susan or I or both of us together. 'Oh God, no. I saw what children do. They turn a good respectable woman into a mudd-dha. I didn't want to be a mudh-dha. I didn't want to be turned inside out. I didn't want to have my world shifted so that I was no longer the centre of it. This is what you have to be careful about, Lao-Tsu. It never happens to men. They just sow the seed and hand out the cigars when you've pushed a football through your vadge. For the next hundred years of your life, you're stuck with being someone whose definition isn't even herself. You're now someone's mudd-dha!' She — Jerry Pinto

Marriage is all right. At least the person you're having a go at is an adult. But motherhood ... You're given something totally dependent, totally in love with you and it doesn't seem to come with a manual. — Jerry Pinto

Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover it's disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find it's black weight settled inside your mother's chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of colour and the nights of rest. — Jerry Pinto

It meant that we were to march into the hall and take out our school books and reproduce the slipper-shaped animalcule whose pseudopodia power it through a world without feeling; to learn how to inscribe a hexagon into a circle without tearing the paper; to assimilate the causes and consequences of the battle of Panipat without ever identifying your own enemy because that would mean identifying yourself. — Jerry Pinto

Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee. — Jerry Pinto

She grinned, a silty grin. 'You were my two dividends, yes? Don't you forget that.'
Then she sighed, took a deep breath, and said, 'But what an investment. My life. — Jerry Pinto

Took myself to Byculla. The area around the elephants is very soothing. I wish I were an elephant. I would be so composed. — Jerry Pinto

A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what's fiction? — Jerry Pinto

But it seemed as if all psychiatric medicine was aimed only at the symptoms. Mute the paranoia. Calm the rage. Raise the endorphins. Underneath, the mysteries continued, unchanged. Underneath, somewhere in the chemistry of her brain, there was something that could not be reached. — Jerry Pinto

You can cry in public as long as you don not sob. Tears are transparent. If you're walking fast, if the sun's too strong, no one notices. Sobs intrude. They push their way into people's consciousness. They feel duty-bound to ask what has happened. — Jerry Pinto

If there was one thing I feared as I was growing up ...
No, that's stupid. I feared hundreds of things: the dark, the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice the death of my mother, sums involving vernier calipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing much to do, death by drowning.
But of all these, I feared the most the possibility that I might go mad too. — Jerry Pinto

Fight your genes.' The Big Hoom said to us once, to Susan and me. He did not explain. He did not know how to. But we knew what it meant. It meant that we were to march into the hall and take out our school books and reproduce the slipper-shaped animalcule whose psuedopodia power it through a world without feeling; to learn how to inscribe a hexagon into a circle without tearing the paper; to assimilate the causes and consequences of the battle of Panipat without ever identifying your own enemy because that would be mean identifying yourself.
'Fight your genes'. Focus. Be diligent. Concentrate. Do — Jerry Pinto

I am no I. I am now part of a we. — Jerry Pinto

Gertrude was a veteran of the love wars. — Jerry Pinto

After you were born, someone turned on a tap. At first it was only a drip, a black drip, and I felt it as sadness. I had felt sad before ... who hasn't ? I knew what it was like. But I didn't know that it would come like that, for no reason. I lived with it for weeks. — Jerry Pinto

There was something capricious about God. How could one expect perfect submission from those who are imperfect? How could one create desire and then expect everyone to pull the plug on it? And if God were capricious, then God was imperfect. If God were imperfect, God was not God. — Jerry Pinto

That's what comes of this celibacy business. We confess to men who've never had to worry about a family. Naturally, it's a huge sin to them, this abortion business. What do they know? They probably think it's fun and games. Let them try it. — Jerry Pinto

Sometimes I would see myself as a book with bad binding. You know, like one more reader, one more face-down on the bed and I was going to spill everything, lose control — Jerry Pinto

What is it about the sea? Is it because it's there? — Jerry Pinto

On the balcony of our small flat in a city of small flats. — Jerry Pinto