Important Quotations Explained
1. “I told you the truth,” I say
yet again, “Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind.
It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies,
and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous
but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being
ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.”
2. I have been only the humblest
of jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is
what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist,
so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the
case.
3. Let me state this quite unequivocally:
it is my firm conviction that the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani war
of 1965 was nothing more nor less than the elimination of my benighted
family from the face of the earth.
4. Who what am I? My answer: I am
the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been
seen done, , of everything done-to-me.
5. Futility of statistics: during
1971, ten million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan-Bangladesh
into India—but ten million (like all numbers larger than one thousand and
one) refuses to be understood.
