It must have been this that I had been looking for; it was what I wanted. How aware I was of what I discovered in my heart! Peace, sleep, death, time! I was both here and there, in peace and waging a bloody war, insomniac as a restless ghost and also interminably somnolent, present in an eternal night and also in time that flowed away inexorably.

Orhan Pamuk, The New Life (1997) 

What lay, Ravi wondered, between the loss of innocence and rites for departed ancestors?

O.V Vijayan, Legends of Khasak (1994) 

Human life, Indranath reflected, goes through such phases and transformations itself. Nothing is permanent. In this process, human relationships become a sharp, piercing weapon, hurtful and acrimonious to near and dear ones.

  Indira Goswami, The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker (2004)

She shrank within herself and tried to hide her voluptuous form as much as possible. But her whole body was blooming like white kathana flowers. How long could she veil it from the eyes of the world? Even through the cracked mud walls of this ramshackle house, her growing body yielded tantalising glimpses to prying eyes, like the broken, scintillating image of the moon on the ripples of Jagalia.

 Indira Goswami, The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker (2004)

The most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the 'modular' forms of the national society propagated by the modern West.

 Partha Chatterjee, Whose Imagined Community (1991) 

Benedict Anderson demonstrated with much subtlety and originality that nations were not the determinate products of given sociological conditions such as language or race or religion; they had been, in Europe and everywhere else in the world, imagined into existence.

Partha Chatterjee, Whose Imagined Community (1991) 

In dreams begin responsibilities. The way we see the world affects the world we see.

 Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line (speech delivered at Yale University, 2002)