Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

A place is not a place without a bookstore.

Why do people do what they do?

“It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone."

“All I can say is . . . All I can say is we’ll figure it out, I swear. When I read a book, I want you to be reading it at the same time. I want to know what would Amelia think of it. I want you to be mine. I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart, Amy"

She can’t help thinking how young she’d been, how impossibly high her standards.

halfway through telling it, he almost decides to drop the tote and run.

"I'm old, set in my ways, contrary."

“Sometimes books don’t find us until the right time."

Maya puts her hand over A.J.’s to stop him from turning the page just yet.She scans her eyes from the picture to the page and back again.All at once,she knows that r-e-d is red,knows it like she knows her name is Maya,like she knows A.J.Fikry is her father, like she knows the best place in the world is Island Books.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Red,” she says. She takes his hand and moves it so it is pointing to the word.

Maya knows that her mother left her in Island Books. But maybe that’s what happens to all children at a certain age. Some children are left in shoe stores. And some children are left in toy stores. And some children are left in sandwich shops. And your whole life is determined by what store you get left in. She does not want to live in the sandwich shop.

The store is fifteen Mayas wide and twenty Mayas long. She knows this because she once spent an afternoon measuring it by lying her body across the room. It is fortunate that it is not more than thirty Mayas long because that is as far as she could count on the day the measurements were taken.

The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.

A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it’s love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother.

“As a form, the picture book has a similar elegance to the short story."

“Is this a book group?” A.J. says.

“Isn’t it?” Margene says. “You didn’t think all this child-rearing advice came for free, did you?”

In April, The Paris Wife. In June, A Reliable Wife. In August, American Wife. In September, The Time Traveler’s Wife. In December, he runs out of decent books with wife in the title. They read Bel Canto.

Google is wide but not, alas, terribly deep.

"It takes A.J. several Google searches to determine bathing protocol: appropriate temperature bath water two-year-old; can a two-year-old use grown-up shampoo?; how does a father go about cleaning a two-year-old girl’s private parts without being a pervert?; how high to fill tub—toddler; how to prevent a two-year-old from accidentally drowning in tub; general rules for bath safety, and so on."

a theft is an acceptable social loss while a death is an isolating one.

“Your only move is to become a vampire, too. Don’t try to fight it. That’s the absolute worst thing you could do.

“Your only move is to become a vampire, too. Don’t try to fight it. That’s the absolute worst thing you could do."

"What a goddamn Danielle Steel move, Nic! If this were a novel, I’d stop reading right now. I’d throw it across the room.”

"I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please."

Amelia the bright-sider believes it is better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn’t share your sensibilities and interests. (It is, right?)

when she’d asked him about the book that had had the greatest influence on his life, and he’d replied Principles of Accounting, Part II.

Come on, sweetheart
let's adore one another
before there is no more
of you and me.
- RUMI

"When she'd asked him about the book that had the greatest influence on his life, and he'd replied Principles of Accounting, Part II."

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits, as Moira would say.

One of the hardest things was knowing that these other people were risking their lives for you when they didn't have to.