Widya Kumarasinghe > Widya's Quotes

“Being close to someone meant more than being next to them after all, it meant more than simply having spent a lot of time with them. Being close to someone meant the entire rhythm of that person's life was synchronized with yours, it meant that each body had to learn how to respond to the other instinctually, to its gestures and mannerisms, to the subtle changes in the cadence of its speech and gait, so that all the movements of one person had gradually come to be in subconscious harmony with those of the other.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Things just happen and we have to accept them. Happiness and sadness are for people who can control what happens to them.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“A feminism that seeks power instead of questioning it does not care about justice.”
― Lola Olufemi, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power

“A commitment to disrupting the state's violence when and where we see it takes feminism outside of the realm of words and theories and makes it a living, breathing set of principles. It reminds us that where we can make interventions, we should and that only work that seeks to shake and unsettle the very foundations of the sexist state is feminist work.”
― Lola Olufemi, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power

“Feminism is a political project about what could be. It's always looking forward, invested in futures we can't quite grasp yet. It's a way of wishing, hoping, aiming, at everything that has been deemed impossible.”
― Lola Olufemi, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power

“There was always someone somewhere discovering a different life, a different experience than the day before, stepping off into uncharted territory. But I wasn't getting anywhere. I couldn't move; in fact, I was being pulled away, slipping further every second from the blinding light of that reality.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“It feels like I’m trapped inside my body. It decides when I get hungry, and when I’ll get my period. From birth to death, you have to keep eating and making money just to stay alive.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Light spilled off every surface. The light of day. I meditated on this phrase and stared into the radiance.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“The sleep was like as it had been cut out from a slab of clay, round and clean.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Yes, yes, if you please. No reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion