She Reads South Asia > She Reads's Quotes

“That's how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sister of My Heart

“And as if he had read her thoughts, the old man murmured, 'What a blessing it is to die in your own bed, under your own roof, with your family surrounding you, full of the knowledge that you have lived as thoroughly as you wanted to.”
― Anita Rau Badami, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy

“I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.”
― Arundhati Roy

“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy

“No, no, don’t touch your mother just before the baby is born. Now it will be a girl child, because you are one. Run along now. Take your evil eye with you.”

“Ghias, we must be careful not to teach the girls too much. How will they ever find husbands if they are too learned? The less they know, the less they will want of the outside world.”
― Indu Sundaresan, The Twentieth Wife

“She thought she could see the lines on his forehead even in this darkness, she thought she could hear his heart beat with this colossal pain that had descended upon them all. She did not pity herself, or them, or wonder what they had done to deserve all of this, or even think that perhaps they were all paying their dues for some sin they had committed in a previous life. This was life, such as it was, and it had to be borne, it had to be lived.”
― Indu Sundaresan, The Splendor of Silence

“But Mehrunnisa did not know then, would never know, by giving her blessings to this marriage she had set into progress a chain of events that would eventually erase her name from history's pages. Or that Arjumand would become the only Mughal woman posterity would easily recognize. Docile, seemingly tractable and troublesome Arjumand would eclipse even Mehrunnisa, cast her in a shadow...because of the monument Khurram would build in Arjumand's memory - the Taj Mahal.”
― Indu Sundaresan, The Feast of Roses

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance Of Loss

“A journey once begun, has no end”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.”
― Kiran Desai

“What's the fun in standing in the outskirts of love and feeling superior? There's no shame in having got it wrong. Whereas its a shame when you don't even give yourself the chance of getting it right. Better to have loved and lost...”
― Priya Basil

“if you have not made somebody's day happier, if you've not appreciated something good that has happened to you and if you have not felt thankful to be alive, then you have wasted that day of your life on earth!”
― Preeti Shenoy, Life is What You Make It: A Story of Love, Hope and How Determination Can Overcome Even Destiny

“A veritable atlas. What rivers of desire, what mountains of ambition. Want, want, hope, hope, this is what your palm say, your palm is nothing but an atlas of impossible longings.”
― Anuradha Roy, An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“Even as I took a long, hard look at some of the obvious downsides (Q: 'What are the three things keeping India down? A: Corruption, corruption and corruption.'
), I still felt the upsides (Q: 'What is so fantastic about the India story? A: People, people and people.') tilted the scales in our favor.”
― Shobhaa De, Superstar India: From Incredible To Unstoppable

“Indian food is like classical music raga- it takes time to build up to a crescendo.”
― Shobhaa De, Superstar India: From Incredible to Unstoppable

“How can it be that this town is so full of people they're falling off the pavements and yet only in dreams am I in someone's arms?”
― Anjum Hasan, Difficult Pleasures

“If a liar tells you he is lying, is he telling the truth.”
― Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

“Jonny has a theory that South Africa are doomed to choke in every major tournament for the next fifty years as payment for apartheid. He also believes that England will spend centuries working off their colonial sins by performing miserably at sport. I then ask him why Australia, who wiped out generations of Aborigines, win everything in every sport, and he shuts up.”
― Shehan Karunatilaka

“When a New Zealand journo, with a nose resembling the beak of his national bird, asked me why Lankans have long names, I told him I would rather have a long name than a long nose. He replied he'd rather have a long you-know-what. Such is the insightful cricketing analysis that goes on in the press box.”
― Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

“How could we have allowed the instinct bred within us over the centuries to draw lines and never cross them, an infinity of lines, ever-smaller lines, ever-sharper distinctions? I grieved for Didi's generation of "girls of good family," who put caste, duty and family reputation before self-indulgence.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters