And then there are books that you fall in love with. Books that are so wonderful that you just want to save each line. Picked from the Time Magazine Top 100 books list – A Passage to India by E.M Forester.

The current surge of protests, revolts, clashes and fights for freedom around the world has been having its effect on me. I often wonder how the local people felt the effect and what they go through and reading this book in the current world makes so much sense. I am pretty sure that this book by no means an authentic look into the British Raj but it is close enough.

It is like watching a period film. The storyline just does not matter. The lines – the words make this book what it is. It is one thing writing beautifully but it is something else to have great thoughts that are written beautifully.

I hated the storyline but it was the sentences – a string of words that made me love this book.

I am not writing a review but I am leaving you with few of my favorite lines from the book – lines worth documenting here.

Most of the inhabitants of India do not mind how India is governed

No Indian animal has any sense of an interior. Bats, rats, birds, insects will as well nest inside a house as out;

There’s nothing in India but the weather, my dear mother; it’s the Alpha and Omega of the whole affair.

Trying to recover his temper he said” “India likes gods”. ‘And Englishmen like posing as gods’ (she said)

“Trouble after trouble encountered him, because he had challenged the spirit of the Indian earth, which tried to keep men in compartments”

“Still, Fielding was an Englishman, and they never do miss trains, and Godbole was a Hindu and did not count, and, soothed …”

“Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.”

“You keep your religion and I mine. That is the best. Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing, and that was Akbar’s mistake.”