I think I posted this on another blog long ago, which no longer exists, but it describes many second-generation, hyphenated Indians like myself:
India is for me a difficult country. It isn't my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.
--V.S. Naipaul, from his book India: A Wounded Civilization.
The opening paragraph from one my favorite novels of all time, Around The World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne:
Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world. People said that he resembled Byron--at least that his head was Byronic; but he was a bearded, tranquil Byron, who might live on a thousand years without growing old.
"Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream, and war is an integral part of God's ordering of the universe...Without war, the world would become swamped in materialism."
--General Helmuth von Moltke
From Patricia Highsmith's Strangers On A Train, a telling quote, and the novel's defining theme:
Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far-- and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink.
