The Forty Rules of Love is a wise, joyous page-turner... and one that speaks urgently to our war-ravaged times.

Thrity Umrigar

Categorized in : War Love Is Wise

Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened.

life-happens delight brutality

Liquor is the kiss of the angels as well as the curse of the devil. It can conceal but also can reveal

devil kissing angel

This is love-not what we say to each other but what we not say. Sometime it just one look exchange. Sometime one word. But underlining everything we say or not say, something else. Something heavy and deep, like when we in bed and looking into each other's eyes. For six years, everything between husband and me was on top, like skin. Now it hidden, like bone and muscle. [] He care for me now. He finally see me. And he like what he see.

husband eye years

Or perhaps is is that time doesn't heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones - the angle of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile - has collapsed under the weight of your griefs.

grief eye lying

And a mother without children is not a mother at all, and if I am not a mother, than I am nothing. Nothing. I am like sugar dissolved in a glass of water. Or, I am like salt, which disappears when you cook with it. I am salt. Without my children, I cease to exist.

glasses mother children

I intend to give my eighty-two-year-old dad a copy of God Never Blinks. I will also buy one for a sixteen-year-old friend. This wise, compassionate, and honest book is a blueprint for living a happy, fulfilling life. Its lessons are timeless – and timely.

dad wise book

And so I have to live. Because we live for more than just ourselves, Most of the time we live for others, keep putting one foot before the other, left and right, left and right, so that walking becomes a habit, just like breathing. Ina n out, left and right.

breathing live-for-others feet

So all I'm saying is, everything that seems important--our quarrels, or philosophical differences--in the end, it doesn't matter much. You know? In the end, what matters is what remains.

philosophical what-matters differences

You felt a deep sorrow, the kind of melancholy you feel when you're in a beautiful place and the sun is going down

sorrow sun beautiful

She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.

evil sides war

What she had believed was indignation or rage or a deep intolerance for injustice came down to this: she was irreducibly in love with this bewitching planet, this thrilling life, this heartbreaking species she belonged to, with its capacity for stupefying destruction and breathtaking magnanimity.

heartbreaking injustice breathtaking

Her hands were empty now, as empty as her heart, which itself was a coconut shell with its meat scooped out.

meat heart hands

Tomorrow. The word hangs in the air for a moment, both a promise and a threat. Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking at her ankles.

taken air water

India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.

real ambition spiritual

All these tears shed in the world, where do they go? If one could capture all of them, they could water the parched. Then perhaps these tears would have value and all this grief would have some meaning. Otherwise, it was all a waste, just an endless cycle of birth and death; of love and loss.

grief loss water