Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.
Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.
The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters—it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too soon and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.
That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
My grandfather says that’s what books are for,” Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an inch.
He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he’d landed and made his life, was not his,
But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost
…that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.
I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.
…American book jackets reflect the spirit of country – little homogeneity, lots of diversity.
Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.
Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been paired down to its solitary components.
Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere.
Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.
In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.
With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before
On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.
In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else.
I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you.
There was the focus of seeking pleasure, and the numbing effect, once they were finished, removing all specific thoughts from her brain. It ushered in the solid, dreamless sleep that otherwise eluded her.
I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.
She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.
No more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of the day. No more waiting for the situation to change.
She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing life with the person she loved.
I’m bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn’t torment or grieve me.
I’ve never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people’s computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I’ve opened email accounts, twice actually, but it’s something I don’t want in my life right now.
I don’t know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents’ marriage. And it’s interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.
If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that places can signify emotion in them – and the way those bonds can be shattered.
I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.
Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece – just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.