Top 35 Manu Joseph Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Morality was probably the invention of unattractive men. Whom else does it benefit really.”

— Manu Joseph

2. “At the heart of memory, is the stillness of time.”

— Manu Joseph

3. “That men, in reality, did not have friends in other men. That the fellowship of men, despite its joyous banter, old memories of exaggerated mischief and the altruism of sharing pornography, was actually a farcical fellowship. Because what a man really wanted was to be bigger than his friends.”

— Manu Joseph

4. “But then the fate of shy people is that all of their fears usually come true.”

— Manu Joseph

5. “The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how standard are falling. – Serious Men.”

— Manu Joseph

6. “No matter what the delusions are, parents do not really know their children.”

— Manu Joseph

7. “It affects him, the great arrogance of the Equilateral Triangle, the failed aspiration of the octagon to be a circle, the eternal suffocation of the denominator that has to bear the weight of the unjust numerator, the loneliness of Pluto. And the smallness of Mercury, always a mere dot next to a yellow sun. In this world, there is no respect for Mercury.”

— Manu Joseph

8. “The fate of every love story, he knew very well, is in the rot of togetherness, or in the misery of separation.”

— Manu Joseph

9. “Thoma is amazed at the telepathy of women. How miraculous it is for one woman to do something weird and another woman to extract its intended meaning.”

— Manu Joseph

10. “The distinction between a delusion and a lie is the very difference between a successful saint and a fraud.”

— Manu Joseph

11. “It is a moment that has no meaning. It is as if the tired charade of human life with its great pursuits and history and wounds and deep convictions has collapsed, and the world has been suddenly revealed as a place that has no point, that does not need the hypothesis of meaning to explain its existence.”

— Manu Joseph

12. “My love, I feel terrible without you. It is like being with you.”

— Manu Joseph

13. “Operna did not understand this habit of Indian men. If they could letch at her so overtly, they might as well ask her directly who she was. Why did they always turn to someone else and say, ‘Wont you introduce us?’ It was so pathetic.”

— Manu Joseph

14. “After riding like a moron all over the place, observes the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.”

— Manu Joseph

15. “You acquire a new kind of intelligence when you stay away from instant news.”

— Manu Joseph

16. “It is an inevitability that masquerades as a decision. That is the way of a drunkard. He grants himself the dignity of choice, as if there is another option. But then is there really any choice in the world? Could it be that every human action is merely an inevitability masquerading as a human decision, life granting dignity to its addicts through the delusion of choice?”

— Manu Joseph

17. “The dedication of passwords was the new fellowship of marriage. To each other, couples had become furtive asterisks.”

— Manu Joseph

18. “He was wearing a blue tracksuit that had a white tick mark embroidered at the hip, as if he approved of something.”

— Manu Joseph

19. “He realized in an instant that all the philosophers he had read, all the religions, even Einstein, even J. Krishnamurti, were saying the same thing in different ways – there is a shocking truth hiding behind the world that we see, behind the ordinary days of our lives. God is not a lie, but some kind of an abridged version of this reality, a beginner’s course that has been misunderstood.”

— Manu Joseph

20. “Unni said that there are thousands of Human Sentiments and many of them have not been named in any language. He said every person has at least one emotion that only he or she feels and no one else in the world can even imagine the feeling. ‘Even you, Thoma, among the many things you feel there is one that only you can achieve and no other person in the world.”

— Manu Joseph

21. “You can tell me. A man can tell a naked woman anything.”

— Manu Joseph

22. “And all our gods are not lies. They existed. All our gods, from the beginning of time, have been men with psychiatric conditions. And their delusions were so deep, they passed them on.”

— Manu Joseph

23. “And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It’s the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother’s advice to her son, a father’s irrevocable decision, a boy’s first foreboding of life.”

— Manu Joseph

24. “In the twilight that was now the colour of dust, in the fury of horns that was a national language because honking had telegraphic properties...”

— Manu Joseph

25. “The extraordinary triumph of the cellphone among India’s poor stemmed from its ability to enable a most mundane human need, which is to chat with other people. And when the poor chat, it is not always about curing a child of diarrhea.”

— Manu Joseph

26. “She walked to the door and looked at him with an affection that was at once hopeful and melancholic. Like light was both particle and wave.”

— Manu Joseph

27. “That is the quality of drunkards, they have a lot of friends. Because what men find most endearing in other men are their tragic flaws.”

— Manu Joseph

28. “Rather as an epitaph tells the story of a whole life in the hyphen between two dates.”

— Manu Joseph

29. “Thoma has never understood why this moment means so much to his mother. Criticism of tea is hardly a matter that should affect a clever woman like her. But Unni did tell him one day that in the words of some women there was great injustice that only other women could decipher. ‘It is not about the tea, Thoma, it is never about the tea.”

— Manu Joseph

30. “A mysterious character of UFOs is that they are sighted only in the First World,′ she said, ’and no alien conquest of Earth begins until the mayor of New York holds an emergency press conference. When Mars attacks, it attacks America.”

— Manu Joseph

31. “There is a crowd outside the main door, talking softly about the death as if they don’t want the dead man to know that he is gone.”

— Manu Joseph

32. “She made him sad, but he also longed for this sorrow to arrive in his room as often as possible in that ascetic uniform of long top and jeans, the cassock of her platonic detachment.”

— Manu Joseph

33. “A man on a bike was riding on the pavement. When he tried to plunge into the road, a car hit him. He fell down but managed to get up. He looked shocked. That, Ayyan loved. After riding like a moron all over the place, observe the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.”

— Manu Joseph

34. “That a mystery must have a resolution is obviously not a requirement of nature. It is, in fact, another deceit of writers.”

— Manu Joseph

35. “Ambition is the capacity for unhappiness.”

— Manu Joseph

36. “Ousep looked carefully at the priest. A fifty-year-old virgin, a fully grown man in a white gown who believed that he was an elf who connected God to man, this clown thought Unni was strange.”

— Manu Joseph