Meatless Days Quotes

“Speaking two languages may seem a relative affluence, but more often it entails the problems of maintaining a second establishment even though your body can be in one place at a time. When I return to Urdu, I feel shocked at my own neglect of a space so intimate to me: like relearning the proportions of a once-familiar room, it takes me by surprise to recollect that I need not feel grief, I can eat grief; that I need not bury my mother but instead can offer her into the earth, for I am in Urdu now.”
― Sara Suleri, Meatless Days

“You can't treat people's feelings as thought they were items on a marketplace.”
― Sara Suleri, Meatless Days

“One's aesthetic changes once one has a child.”
― Sara Suleri, Meatless Days

“The only trouble with being female in Pakistan is that it allows for two possible modes of behaviour--either you can be sweet and simple, or you can be cold and proud.”
― Sara Suleri, Meatless Days

“There were always a few words that his flamboyant English insisted he mispronounce: words, I often imagined, over which his heart took hidden pleasure when he had got them by the gullet and held them there until they empurpled to the color of his own indignant nature. "Another" was one of them--I cannot count how many times each day we would hear him say, "Anther?" "Anther?" It did not matter whether it was another meal or another government or another baby at issue: all we heard was a voice bristling over with amazement at the thought that another could exist. It seemed his patience could not sustain itself over the trisyllabic, tripping up his voice on most trisyllables that did not sound like "Pakistan"--for there was a word over which he could not slow down, to exude ownership as he uttered it!”
― Sara Suleri, Meatless Days