Evergreen Bond (Owen Ruskin Bond)
Dancing with the “Lone Fox”
"… clean words flowered on the pages of my notebook…"
"… much of it, after all, is lived inside our heads…"
"If we are lucky, we love with both heart & body…"
".. reading books upside-down, it’s a useful skill to have, especially when life begins to get difficult & boring."
"We get used to happiness very quickly, more so when we are children.
I see the night as a friend, giving me the privacy that I find so hard to find the day.
Some friends - their eyes, their touch, their words- cannot be erased from our memory.
You never really get over the loss of a beloved. You learn to live despite it.
It is our shared loneliness that brought us together."
"The kindest people are often those who have come through testing personal tragedies."
"Did I sense another adult in the class? Someone who was a little older than his years?"
"And when all wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful."
"You can’t win forever."
"… a few will not be spoken of, for some passions are private …"
"Every cloud has a silver lining."
"I wanted the freedom of being my very own person."
"Chance gives, and takes away, and gives again!"
"I was almost thirty - still young enough to take a few risks. If the dream was to become reality, this was the tome to do something about it."
"Sometimes, when words ring true.."
"I don’t mind being dead, but I shall miss being alive."
"The secret of his longevity was that he refused to go to bed when he was unwell. Nothing would prevent him from getting up, dressing up, writing letters or getting on with a Wodehouse."
"I was thirty - dangerous age for dreamers, when youth is beginning to say goodbye…"
"I was entitled to a holiday, but some stories were brewing."
"One way to get over a failed love affair is to get married. Another is to trek into beautiful deserted places."
"Sit down, stop chasing, and the words will come, and maybe love, too."
"You know very well I’ve never cared about money. Daddy taught me to write. That was inheritance enough. I’m not sure .. perhaps you taught me how to enjoy myself now and then!."
"For better or worse, we are all shaped by our parents."
"Perseverance does pay."
"I still value my solitude, but it is also nice to have someone tucking me into bed at night."
"Sometimes it is good to fail; to loose what you most desire; to come second."
The Ultimate Ones
"There is supposed to be something very romantic about being a writer, and some of us set out to write as if we are on the road to romance. Very often, for those who persist, it is the road to drudgery; we end up as hacks or literary critics. I was fortunate in that I ventured into the literary world with a certain wide-eyed innocence, and managed that innocence for most of my life."
"I had a typewriter, a table and a chair and a clay surahi for my drinking water - and I discovered that’s all you really need. Sixty-five years later I still need the table and chair (or bedside), but I have dispensed with the typewriter, it makes for too much clutter, and I now write with a ball-point or roller- ball."
"‘Home’ - that was the magnet . Not the ‘home’ of my mother and stepfather, but the larger home that was India, where I would even feel free to be a failure. … a land of acceptance, All I really wanted was my little room back again. It wasn’t the family that brought me back, it was the country..."
"Being Indian, and feeling Indian.."
"I belonged to the hot sunshine and muddy canals, the banyan trees and the mango groves, the smell of wet earth after summer rain, the relief of a monsoon thunderstorm, the laughing brown faces. And the intimacy of human contact - that was what I had missed the ost in England. The orderly life, the good sense and civility were all admirable, but they did nothing for the soul. I missed the freedom to touch someone without being misunderstood; the freedom to hold someone’s hand as a mark of affection rather than desire, but also to show desire without reserve and find fulfillment. I missed being stranger without feeling like an outsider; I missed everything that made it all right to be sentimental and emotional."
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