Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"To celebrate human love, Jesus turned six vessels of water into wine. It was his first miracle."

"Fire annihilates and rescues, kills and gives life, as do the gods, as do we."

"At the end of 2004, when the tsunami trampled the coasts of India, they collected the garbage and the dead. As always."

"The outcasts, one in five Indians, are beneath those on the bottom. They are called “Untouchables” because they contaminate: damned among the damned, they cannot speak to others, walk on their paths, or touch their glasses or plates. The law protects them, reality banishes them. Anyone can humiliate the men, anyone can rape the women, which is the only time the untouchables are touchable."

"As the owners of heaven forbade chocolate to mortals, so the owners of the earth forbade it to commoners."

"The hunted is the hunter, the mouthful is now the mouth."

"To be mouth or mouthful, hunter or hunted. That was the question.
...
Weren’t we able to survive, when survival was all but impossible, because we learned to share our food and band together for defense? Would today’s me-first, do-your-own-thing civilization have lasted more than a moment?"

"Later rather than sooner, divine order reestablishes its hierarchies and geographies, and everything and everyone gets put in its place. But sooner rather than later, madness reappears.

Then the gods lament that the world is such a difficult place."

"পেশাদার অভিনেতা হিসাবে আমি যে বেশি যন্ত্রণা পাই তার কারণ হল আমি বুঝি আমার শ্রম আমার ব্যক্তিত্ব থেকে বিচ্ছিন্ন করে কয়েকটা ব্যবসাদারের মুনাফাই শুধু বাড়াচ্ছে নয় - পরন্তু আমার শ্রম এই মৃতপ্রায় পচা সমাজটাকে চিরস্থায়ী করার চেষ্টাতেও কাজে লাগছে।...এই সমাজটাকে বদলানোর পথে এই চলচ্চিত্রগুলো কি বিরাট একটা বাঁধা সৃষ্টি করতে সক্ষম, কেননা মাধ্যমটা খুবই শক্তিশালী।”
-স্বগত, ১৯৭০

"The television series has respected one of the axioms of the novel: no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history."

"Thirty-five years is a long time to think about possible answers, and the answers have changed as society itself has changed, and as possibilities have become actualities. The citizens of many countries, including the United States, are under more stresses now than they were three decades ago.”

"You can take the historian out of the storyteller, but you can’t take the storyteller out of the historian!"

"...as the young are idealistic, have an underdeveloped sense of their own mortality, and are afflicted with an exaggerated thirst for justice."

"I situate you at your desk, your hair tucked back behind your ears, your nail polish chipped—for nail polish will have returned, it always does."

"The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated."

"But many of us would rather not be who we are. We don’t have unlimited choices in that department."

"I would consider my soul—because I did believe I had one—and how twisted and corrupted it would become if I were to act in that way."

"...saying God was a cultural belief was even worse than saying he was an imaginary friend."

"I could hear the words, I could understand the words themselves, but I couldn’t translate them into meaning."

"I waver, I waver.
But tomorrow is another day."

"As I have said, there was a vengeful side to me that I had in the past regretted. Regretted but not expunged."

"Public trials—meant to purge traitors and purify the leadership—had turned on false confessions extracted by torture."

"The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it."

"She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both. That was how she had managed her own crisis.

I said that I wasn’t sure I would be able to choose. Secretly I feared that I would be unable to believe in either. Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?"

"To be given stupid orders by someone almost your age is a lot more irritating than having that person be old."

"Being able to read and write did not provide the answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others."

"The books I was given to learn from were about a boy and a girl called Dick and Jane. The books were very old, and the pictures had been altered at Ardua Hall. Jane wore long skirts and sleeves, but you could tell from the places where the paint had been applied that her skirt had once been above her knees and her sleeves had ended above her elbows. Her hair had once been uncovered."

"It was how the Aunts got their power: by finding things out. Things that should never be talked about."

"Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet."

"All things come to she who waits. Time wounds all heels. Patience is a virtue. Vengeance is mine."