Unreliable Narrator Quotes

“So much more of life is lived in the process rather than the result—but we insist on bolding the latter.”
― Aparna Nancherla, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome

“In hindsight, I’d say to any aspiring artists: Follow your intuition when it comes to offers for work or career exposure, no matter how excited you are to be asked at all. You don’t have to orchestrate your own suffering to be good at anything. You will still suffer. Nature finds a way.”
― Aparna Nancherla, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome

“A little game I like to play, especially at parties or other gatherings where I generally feel on edge, is to drop a word I made up in conversation. My success rate with this is pretty fernicious, if I do say so myself. On four out of five occasions, nobody asks me what the word means or questions its veracity. And we wonder how rumors spread.”
― Aparna Nancherla, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome

“How much does my fear of owning this darker voice hinge on a cultural insistence that it’s unhealthy, even unnatural?” She asks, “What if I’m all of it?” She compellingly argues that we need a more nuanced understanding of the mind of a depressed person, especially because it’s so likely that the depression will recur. She writes, “Survival is continuous; often, it feels like waiting.”
― Aparna Nancherla, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome

“I’m not as interested in the person who got the thing as I am in the next person in line who almost did, or even the person behind them who doesn’t know why they’re in line but wanted to see what all the fuss is about.”
― Aparna Nancherla, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome

“I refused to hold an opinion and stand by it, because I kept coming back to my brain’s excellent reminder that I didn’t know what I was talking about. But if I did think I knew what I was talking about, I wouldn’t be qualified to write a book about my intimate experience with impostor syndrome, now would I? And if the writing process itself didn’t give me all the answers, maybe it would at least prove my editor wrong, because isn’t the best art created out of spite?”
― Aparna Nancherla, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome