Soumitra Chatterjee Quotes

This is the last time I'm asking you this,
Put my name at the top of your lips.
This is the last time I'm asking you why
You break my heart in the blink of an eye, eye, eye.

A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power.

Never mind, I'll find someone like you,
I wish nothing but the best for you, too.
Don't forget me, I beg.
I remember you said,
"Sometimes it lasts in love,
But sometimes it hurts instead.

But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

I am not ashamed of my past and don't intend to be ashamed of it.

I have never thought there was much to be said in favor of dragging on long after all one's friends were dead.

Things That Lose by Being Painted
Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.Things That Gain by Being Painted
Pines. Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene. (p. 138)

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

My hunter of dragonflies,
How far
has he wandered today?

In my last book I said: “I have one dream: to find a dream.” A dream is a piece of the sky found in everyone. We can’t be boundlessly realistic or pragmatic. We are in need of the sky.

I so detached my heart from the world and cut short my hopes that for thirty years now I have performed each prayer as though it were my last and I were praying the prayer of farewell.

Is not just a faded echo of the feeble voice of decadent romanticism but an authentic Indian English utterance exquisitely tuned to the composite to Indian ethos, bringing home to the unbiased reader all the opulence, pageantry and charm of Indian life, and the spenders of Indian scene.

J. R. Puri & T. R. Shangari: Bulleh Shah, The Love-Intoxicated Iconoclast, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Amritsar, India, 1986

One should write not unskilfully in the running hand, be able to sing in a pleasing voice and keep good time to music; and, lastly, a man should not refuse a little wine when pressed upon him.

I hope you will find another one who is both beautiful and good to take my place and serve our parents and bring up my children, and then I shall die content.

...a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth ...