"Miguel Street" Quotes
By V.S. Naipaul
fiction | 222 pages | Published in NaN
"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. There's Popo the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build "the thing without a name." There's Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion, and the dreaded Big Foot, the bully with glass tear ducts. There's the lovely Mrs. Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.Set during World War II and narrated by an unnamed-but precociously observant-neighborhood boy, Miguel Street is a work of mercurial mood shifts, by turns sweetly melancholy and anarchically funny. It overflows with life on every page.
| ISBN_13: | 9780375713873 |
Quotes
The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards.
The important thing is to be always thinking of something.
There is a great deal of good in people. In some it is dormant, but it is there.
The most beautiful word in the English language is 'cellar-door.'
Love and a cough cannot be hid.
We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.
I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
I was waiting for the idea of home to come to me, for someone to say it, and I realized that it wasn't necessary. I could carry it with me. I could go to a place and be the idea of home.
It isn't money itself that causes greed, but the love of money.
A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more.
