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The Buddha of Suburbia QUOTES

The Buddha of Suburbia QUOTES

1 " However angry I was with him, however much I wanted to humiliate Terry, I suddenly saw such humanity in his eyes, and in the way he tried to smile - such innocence in the way he wanted to understand me, and such possibility of pain, along with the implicit assumption that he wouldn't be harmed - that I pulled away. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

2 " I began to enjoy my own generosity; I felt the pleasure of pleasing others, especially as this was accompanied by money-power. I was paying for them; they were grateful, they had to be; and they could no longer see me as a failure. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

3 " You see, I have come to believe in self-help, individual initiative, the love of what you do, and the full development of all individuals. I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

4 " Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

5 " I didn't want to be educated. It wasn't the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn't. The spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn't want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn't want to work in a place where I couldn't wear my fur coat. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

6 " He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

7 " Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

8 " The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

9 " I admired him more than anyone but I didn't wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

10 " The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

11 " Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

12 " For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

13 " And so I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island. I was surrounded by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn't always be this way. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

14 " People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

15 " قد علمتني الحياة أنه حين يراك الآخرون متحمساً، تفتر حماستهم هم، والعكس صحيح . لذا كلما ازدادت رغبتي بأمر ما، تصنّعت بروداً أعظم حياله . "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

16 " Someone to whom jokes are never told soon contracts enthusiasm deficiency. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

17 " This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

18 " Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I'd throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

19 " The interesting people you wanted to be with - their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

20 " Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first. "

― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia