Khushwant Singh, one of our favorite novelist, known for his humor and poetry, moved on today from our world. We remember him and his work with the following picks of some of his quotes:
“Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis.”
― Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan
“Morality is a matter of money. Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion.”
― Khushwant Singh
“When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.”
― Khushwant Singh, Delhi: A Novel
“Your principle should be to see everything and say nothing. The world changes so rapidly that if you want to get on you cannot afford to align yourself with any person or point of view.”
― Khushwant Singh
“But big people’s illnesses are always made to sound big. The simple shutting and opening of the royal arse-hole was made to sound as if the world was coming to an end.”
― Khushwant Singh, Delhi: A Novel
“When you have counted eighty years and more, Time and Fate will batter at your door; But if you should survive to be a hundred, Your life will be death to the very core.”
― Khushwant Singh, Delhi: A Novel
“Nature provides that a man who slaves all day should spend the hours of the night in a palace full of houris whereas a king who wields the sceptre by day should have his sleep disturbed by nightmares of rebellion and assassination.”
― Khushwant Singh, Delhi: A Novel
“The eye hath ruined me,’ the heart complained. ‘The heart has lost me,’ the eye replied. I know not which told the truth, which lied Between, the two, it was Meer who died.”
― Khushwant Singh, Delhi: A Novel
“We also knew that it was in the nature of an empty stomach to produce illusions of grandeur.”
― Khushwant Singh, Delhi: A Novel
