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Fairy Tales at Fifty QUOTES

Fairy Tales at Fifty QUOTES

1 " The days turned slowly, somewhat with the rhythm of a gently swirling merry-go-round from which one simply cannot get off. They seemed for everybody to be suffused with hate and its variants. One detested, for example—and without quite wanting to—other cars in the morning rush-hour traffic. Later in the day, one felt envious of, or contempt for, one’s office colleagues and the relish with which they played—over their teacups and through their coffee breaks—their games of one-upmanship that would be disrupted only when the acid in their tongues descended to gnaw at their stomach linings or they felt the first paralysing jabs of their hearts going on the blink. Even when, during the day, to relieve stress—except that, paradoxically, it seemed instead to sharpen the desolation, illumine more pitilessly the bleakness, the vanity of their futures—even when one of them throbbed to touch some proximate human, that lust too seemed destructive and replete with hate, a form of battering rancour. "

― Upamanyu Chatterjee , Fairy Tales at Fifty

2 " The railway station provided them all that they needed: flatulence-generating food, tea, water, paan, shelter, electricity, social intercourse, seating, mucky toilets—and drugs, coolies, women and children for sale at most reasonable prices. What more could a man ask for? "

― Upamanyu Chatterjee , Fairy Tales at Fifty

3 " Fifty long years rapidly up and yet how quietly and without fuss they continued to glide into the future on a smooth and silent electric train that had no brakes; not moving dramatically fast but simply and inexorably, as though it, being a monstrous, impassive machine, saw no need to pick up speed to arrive at a future that too would be so unnervingly dull, so much a numbing repetition of fruitless routine, its incapacitating tedium to be interrupted only by death, that final, endless, terrifying yawn. "

― Upamanyu Chatterjee , Fairy Tales at Fifty