Abi > Abi's Quotes

“This was the version of her who had survived and there was no sense in apologizing for being a survivor.”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“Wasn't sanity like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“Women were built to endure the rules men make.”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“Men like him would always look at her and see the things they were glad they weren't: weak, small, timid, powerless. Let them. She'd expended so much energy vying for a broken seat at an uneven table.”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“But from the get-go, they trained boys not to apologize and women to not expect it of them, to instead mutate pain into an art form.”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“Why was I so busy protecting the copper I had with you, that I destroyed the gold I had with her?”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“Exactly, we’re a bunch of housewives. We make your food, we watch your children, we hear your business. We know your lives well enough to ruin them. So I’d be careful.”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“There was a Geeta before Ramesh’s hands had found her, and that Geeta was still alive, and even if no one else was interested in knowing her, Geeta was.”
― Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens

“You can't blame her,' said Amit. 'After a life so full of tragedy anyone would become hard.'

'What tragedy?' asked Mrs. Chatterji.

'Well, when she was four,' said Amit, 'her mother slapped her--it was quite traumatic--and then things went on in that vein. When she was twelve she came in second in an exam...It hardens you.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“She had dispersed. She was the garden at Prem Nivas (soon to be entered into the annual Flower Show), she was Veena's love of music, Pran's asthma, Maan's generosity, the survival of some refugees four years ago, the neem leaves that would preserve quilts stored in the great zinc trunks of Prem Nivas, the moulting feather of some pond-heron, a small unrung brass bell, the memory of decency in an indecent time, the temperament of Bhaskar's great-grandchildren. Indeed, for all the Minsisster of Revenue's impatience with her, she was his regret.

And it was right that she should continue to be so, for he should have treated her better while she lived, the poor, ignorant, grieving fool.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy