The Newlyweds Quotes

“It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Men she thought, could make a clean break with a woman, could leave in the way Parveen's husband had. Or could even be left, like George and determine to make a life another way. It was women who longed to retain ties and connections, to mix things up in complicated ways.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Cheating means something though,” she said. “Americans are obsessed with it.” “Americans in particular?” “I think they worry about it more—so it happens more.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Fariq took the phone without asking and redialed the number, as if her difficulty might be the result of general female incompetence”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Her whole body was tired, but her mind had the jangly, wakeful feeling that sometimes came over her when she was lying in bed at night in Rochester.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“What a strange thing, she thought, to find out one day that you had built your whole life on a mistake, and the next to discover that this fact would allow you to have your dearest wish.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“She turned off the water, and for a moment she was a newcomer again, alone in the house after George had gone to work.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“They know you and George are coming to get us,” her mother said. George doesn’t want you to come and live with us. “They think we’re rich.” I can’t get pregnant.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“But it wasn’t the intermittent reception or even the whispering that exasperated Amina so much as a familiar trick of her mother’s: to bring up a subject in such a roundabout way that Amina had to pry it out of her, as if she were the one who’d wanted to discuss it in the first place.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Her mother had always seen things that other people couldn’t; she was especially susceptible to ghosts and jinnis, who had appeared to her ever since she was a child.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“She nodded, concealing her emotion because she thought Kim might try to hug her again, and she was never going to get used to the casual frequency of American hugging.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“She nodded, concealing her emotion because she thought Kim might try to hug her again, and she was never going to get used to the”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Years had passed, but we were still arguing about the same stuff. These patterns repeat themselves, with parents and children—that’s another reason I went to India. If I was going to have a family, I wanted it to be totally different from the one I’d had.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“She wasn’t any more familiar with boutique shopping in Bombay or the challenges of dating someone in the movie industry, but she knew what it was to feel that you would never become fully adult in the country where you lived, would never understand the jokes or master the graces that came so naturally to everyone around you.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Around the women who frequented the yoga studio she felt perpetually diminutive, and that physical feeling augmented the psychological sense of her own childishness that she felt in America.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“She had believed that she’d been born with a soul whose thoughts were in no particular dialect, and she’d imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Was there a person who existed beneath languages?”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone. She was older in English, and also less fastidious; she was the parent to her parents.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Now here was an American tragedy, and as sorry as she felt for Kim, who had lost both a husband and a child, there was a part of her that was secretly thrilled. Of all the people Kim might have told, she had chosen Amina.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“There were a lot of other things about village life she thought might surprise her new friend, but she didn’t want to undermine Kim’s admiration for her culture, which she thought was genuine if not especially well informed.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“But Amina couldn’t stand to look. It wasn’t that George was old but that he felt sorry for himself that drove her crazy. If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke—and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth?”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Amina couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to remember your own mother; there had been no one to tell him, through looks and touch and angry scoldings, that he was the most precious person in the world to her.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Who knows? Why do women do anything they do? Except for you,” George amended, as he always did. “You’re logical.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“In Desh, you can make your plans, but they usually do not succeed. But in America you make your plans and then they happen.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“American English was different from the language she’d learned at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Why would some people attracted to what is unfamiliar and others tat what they knew. She thought It may to do how comfortable you are in your own life, how well you though you belong”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke - and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth?”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“Once again she had the disorientating feeling that her past was still happening, unfolding in a parallel stream right alongside her present.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds

“It was possible to be struck dumb by all sorts of emotions, not only surprise, and as they drove back toward Pittsford, Amina thought that there ought to be a whole set of words to encompass all those different varieties of silence.”
― Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds