Navisha > Navisha's Quotes

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Sometimes I think that in not wanting children, I’m preparing for my old age. I know what I want my old age to look like, more than I know almost anything else: a simple home, a simple life, no one needing me for anything, and not needing anyone the way I do now.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the suppose life cycle - how out of one life cycle another cycle is supposed to come. But when out of your life, no new cycle comes, what does that feel like? It feels like nothing. Yet there is a bit of a let-down feeling when the great things that happen in the lives of others - you don't actually want those things for yourself.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Not all men have made women fearful, but yes, all women have experienced fear because of men.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“This is what families do for each other—hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses.” “And little cruelties,” he said.”
― Anne Tyler, French Braid

“I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.”
― Lorrie Moore

“I don't have a love life. I have a like life.'
Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life

“I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.”
― Bohumil Hrabal

“Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession