Shalini Singh 🇮🇳 / ਸ਼ਾਲਿਨੀ ਸਿੰਘ / शालिनी सिंह

“Love is whatever you can still betray”—a sentence that the quicksilver le Carre committed more than once.

“All you have to do is get quiet for a moment or two and you know where you are,” Leonard Cohen told future Governor-General of Canada Adrienne Clarkson, in May 1966, aged thirty-one.

As fatal to mistake gentleness for kindness as to mistake kindness for friendliness.

Contemplation means placing a larger frame around everything, so the small falls into place and we’re reminded of all that doesn’t change. It’s like walking out of a tiny cell into a vast sunlit meadow. No magic or amazement, but just a change of perspective--and proportion.

The Japanese character for “busy,” my wise friend tells me, means “losing one’s heart.”

“Don’t be afraid that your life will end,” wrote Thoreau, “be afraid that it will never begin!”

Home, she said simply, is where the art is. Perhaps suggesting that art is the best home that we can fashion, not inherit. But Bono had said that home is where "the hurt is." Which could mean that art and hurst are all but interchangeable, one giving rise to the other.

I'd never guessed that the gap between generations could be greater than the one between cultures. History today separates us more than geography.

“A book,’ said W.H. Auden, “is any piece of writing that one does not read but is read by.” Which may be why more and more avoid books, as if to avoid the sensation of being seen too deeply.

We keep things for a rainy day, never thinking that the rain might be a torrential storm that washes everything away.

Maybe the mind itself is a kind of artificial intelligence—a very fast and sophisticated computer but one without heart or soul, which thus keeps us away from the deepest truths and all that lies beyond the reach of reason.

The familiar and long-heralded joy of growing older: contentment trumps achievement.

You own only what you can’t lose in a shipwreck, the Sufis say; I would add that you know only what can’t be disproved by calamity.

Maybe, as we come to believe in our own importance less, we come to believe in everything else much more?

“We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and subjects we thrust on their attention," wrote Thoreau, reminding us that what comes out of us will reflect nothing but what goes into us.

“In proportion as our inner life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office." Thoreau's observation of 150 years ago seems more relevant than ever now that the post-office has come to our screens.

Might saying “I wonder,” rather than “I believe” (or “I know"), be the best way to step beyond the world's mounting dividedness?