Brother Quotes

“Memory’s the muscle sting of now.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“But of course, you can’t ever really flee. You’ll forever run the risk of being spotted, if only for a second.”
― David Chariandy, Brother: A Novel

“But, really, Aisha was only herself. That chicken pox scar on her nose. Or that tiny dot with a tail at the edge of her pupil, a tadpole near a whirlpool of black.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“We were nobodies, or else, somehow, a city.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“Doesn’t matter how poor you are. You can always turn up the edge of a collar to style a bit, little things like that. You can always do things to let the world know you’re not nobody. You never know when your break is coming.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“The world around us was named Scarborough. It had once been called “Scarberia,” a wasteland on the outskirts of a sprawling city. But now, as we were growing up in the early ’80s, in the heated language of a changing nation, we heard it called other names: Scarlem, Scarbistan. We lived in Scarbro, a suburb that had mushroomed up and yellowed, browned, and blackened into life.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“But now I glimpsed in him not only a strange and dangerous hope but also something else. There is a thing that sometimes happens between certain neighbourhood boys. It shows itself, this thing, in touched hands, in certain glances and embraces, its truth deep, undeniable, but rarely spoken or explained. Sometimes never even truly spotted. Although now, in the midst of my own thing, I could see.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“She's carrying a backpack, not a suitcase, and this really is how she becomes Aisha.”
― David Chariandy, Brother