Damayanti > Damayanti's Quotes

“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts--it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved--but the fat woman's act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“She had always liked this image of herself as too much trouble, as different, and she sometimes thought of it as a carapace that kept her safe.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“I don't want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life," Curt said with a force that startled her.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“She was after all the kind of woman who would make a man easily uproot his life, the kind who, because she did not expect or ask for certainty, made a certain kind of sureness become possible.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“She liked that he wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“You looked like the kind of person who will do something because you want to, and not because everyone else is doing it.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“-That's a pretty strong opinion.
-I don't know how to have any other kind.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“They wore their love like a heavy perfume, exuding a transparent commitment, touching each other, referring to each other,”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“She found this foolishly exciting, that it was raining where she was and it was not raining where he was, only minutes from her, and so she waited, with impatience, with a charged delight, until they could both see the rain together.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Her looks had changed but the excitable, slightly reckless air about her had not. Unchanged, too, was the eternal gurgle in her voice, laughter just beneath the surface, ready to break free, to erupt.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Her laugh was so vibrant, shoulders shaking, chest heaving; it was the laugh of a woman who, when she laughed, really laughed.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
― richard siken

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“She was a woman of abundant and varied learning, with an extensive imagination, the colorful speech of those who have seen many countries, lived in diverse climates, met different people. And Andrea felt an exotic aura envelop her form, felt a strange seduction emanating from her, an enchantment composed of the vague phantasms of the distant things she had looked at, of the sights she still preserved in her mind's eye, in the memories that filled her soul. And it was an indefinable, inexpressible enchantment; it was as if she carried in her person a trace of the light in which she had been immersed, of the scents she had breathed, of the idioms she had heard; it was as if she carried within her, mingled, faded, indistinct, all the magic of those lands of the sun.”
― Gabriel D'Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure

“He wanted to possess not the body but the soul of that woman; and to possess her entire soul, with all her tenderness, all her joys, all her fears, all her anguish, all her dreams, in other words, the entire lief of her soul; and to be able to say: I am the life of her life.”
― Gabriel D'Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure

“A strange sentimental excitement had overcome him; all the lyrical peaks of his spirit had ignited and were flaming; the hour, the light, the place, all the surrounding things suggested love to him; from the farthest end of the sea right to the humble maidenhair fern of the fountains, a single magical circle was being drawn; and he felt that its center was that woman.”
― Gabriel D'Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure

“You will never known the extent to which my soul is yours.”
― Gabriel D'Annunzio

“If they told me right now to abandon all vanity and all pride, every desire and every ambition, any dearest memory of the past, the sweetest future enticement, and to live uniquely in you and for you, without any tomorrow, without any yesterday, without any other bond, without any other preference, out of the world, entirely lost in your being, forever, until death, I would not hesitate, I would not hesitate. Believe me. You have looked at me, spoken with me, and smiled and answered; you have sat beside me, and you have been silent and thought; and you have lived, alongside me, your eternal existence, that invisible and inaccessible existence that I do not know, that I will never know; and your soul has possessed mine right down to the depths, without changing, without even knowing it, like the sea drinks a river... What does my love do for you? What does love do for you? It is a word that has been profaned too many times, a sentiment that has been falsified too many times. I do not offer you love. But will you not accept the humble tribute of religion that the spirit addresses to a nobler and higher being?”
― Gabriel D'Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure

“She has a great and rare virtue: she is cheerful, but she can understand the sufferings of others and also knows how to soothe them with her mindful compassion. She is, above all, an intellectual woman, a woman of refined tastes, a perfect woman, a friend who is not a burden. She takes perhaps a little too much pleasure in witticisms and clever phrases, but her arrows always have a golden point and are shot with inimitable grace. Certainly, among all the worldly ladies I have known, she is the finest; among all my friends, she is my favorite.”
― Gabriel D'Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure

“someone will remember us
I say
even in another time”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“You may
blame Aphrodite

soft as she is
she has almost
killed me with
love for that boy”
― Sappho

“You will have memories
Because of what we did back then
When we were new at this,

Yes, we did many things, then - all
Beautiful...”
― Sappho, Come Close

“]
]you will remember
]for we in our youth
did these things

yes many and beautiful things
]
]
]”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“For you, a thousand times over”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown