Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"These are little things, but sometimes it is the little things that sting the most."

"We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much."

"The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, 'The higher you go, the fewer women there are.'"

"Of course much of this was tongue- in- cheek, but what it shows is how that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage: you hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don't wear make- up, you don't shave, you're always angry, you don't have a sense of humour, you don't use deodorant."

"At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men."

"He told me that people were saying my novel was feminist, and his advice to me – he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke – was that I should never call myself a feminist, since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist."

"It takes a village to raise a book from a vulnerable manuscript into a strong and beautiful object.”

"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I made you and you made me."

"Some things matter more than winning."

"Carry hunger all your days. Let it guard you, guide you, save you."

"If Blue were a scholar-and she has played one enough times to know she would have loved to be-she would catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end."

"I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you."

"Viewed from sufficient height, all problems are simple."

"I sought loneliness when I was young. You've seen me there: on my promontory, patient and unaware. But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me."

"Assassinations become assignations."

"All good stories travel from the outside in."

"But I am the songbird running out of air, and I must breathe."

"They would make this war, she thinks, if there were not a war already made for them to make."

"Words can wound-but they're bridges, too."

"It's mine. I am careful with what belongs to me. Few things do, you know-belong to me."

"Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein."

"So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden's, not your mission's, but yours, alone. I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex;yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery;yours as I review your words by their sequence,their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours.Still, I suspect you will appreciate the token."

"To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am."

"I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me. But while I've been enmeshed in this wholeness- they are not the whole of me."

'We treat the past as trellis, coax our vineyard through and around, and harvest is not a word for swiftness; the future harvests us, stomps us into wine, pours us back into the root system in loving libation, and we grow stronger and more potent together."

"A confession is also a dare is also a compulsion."

"(Adventure works in any strand- it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.)"

"It feels harder to write than it should. It feels easier to write than it should, as well.”

"How strange to uncover things in sequence!"

"An event- an invasion or a spasm or a sigh- is like a hammer: one side blunt and perfect for driving nails, the other clawed to pry them free."