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That was the one thing about the rain that likened it to sorrow: You did your best to remain untouched, safe and dry, but if and when you failed, there came a point in which you started seeing the problem less in terms of drops than as an incessant gush, and thereby you decide you might as well get drenched.
How amazing was this ability to achieve plenty by achieving little, to go home empty-handed yet still satisfied at the end of the day!
Lately she had decided to purge certain words from her vocabulary and now that she recalled that decision, why not start with the word shame.
The ear was such a trustworthy part of the human body. No matter how much weight you gained, your ears remained exactly the same, always loyal.
She did not like women, which would have been easier to deal with had she not been one of them. Whenever she met a new woman she did one of two things: either waited to see when she would hate her or hated her right away.
Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moonless night in the desert. Before you knew it you could be so carried away that you could lose touch with reality—that stringent and stolid truth from which no minority should ever veer too far from in order not to end up unguarded when the winds shifted and bad times arrived. It didn’t help to be so naïve to think things wouldn’t get bad, for they always did. Imagination was a
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To be too reasonable in this family would be a blunder.
despite all the grief that it embodies, history is what keeps us alive and united.”
It is a scientifically known fact that collectivities are capable of manipulating their individual members’ beliefs, thoughts, and even bodily reactions. You keep hearing a certain story over and over again, and the next thing you know you have internalized the narrative. From that moment on it ceases to be someone else’s story. It is not even a story anymore, but reality, your reality!”
It is almost dawn, a short step away from that uncanny threshold between nighttime and daylight. It is the only time in which it is still possible to find solace in dreams and yet too late to build them anew.
The overwhelming majority of human beings age year by year, but not the clairvoyants: They age story by story.
The mordant gap between the children of those who had managed to stay and the children of those who had to leave.
The oppressor has no use for the past. The oppressed has nothing but the past,
Languages shape us while we are busy thinking we are in charge of them.
Sometimes, absence is actually a bond and distance can help you to look closer.
I believe that if we can dream in more than one language then, yes, we can also write in more than one language.
