The Story of a Brief Marriage Quotes

“Being close to someone meant more than being next to them after all, it meant more than simply having spent a lot of time with them. Being close to someone meant the entire rhythm of that person's life was synchronized with yours, it meant that each body had to learn how to respond to the other instinctually, to its gestures and mannerisms, to the subtle changes in the cadence of its speech and gait, so that all the movements of one person had gradually come to be in subconscious harmony with those of the other.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Things just happen and we have to accept them. Happiness and sadness are for people who can control what happens to them.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“In ordinary life people were always carrying things, it seemed.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Conversation was a fragile thing after all, like a plant that grows only in rich, warm, nourishing soil.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“When the practical concerns of life had been dealt with, when all one’s plans had been settled, what was left, really, for anybody to say?”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“What it would be like to be separated from all these things he did not know, he could not envision, but the more he dwelled on it the more he understood that it was not so much fear of being separated that he felt as sadness at the idea of parting.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Perhaps this was why as one grew older one broke down and cried for oneself less, because tears for oneself could only come when one ignored the suffering of everybody else, or pretended at least that it was not significant. As you got older the suffering of others became more difficult to ignore, as you saw more of life and became more a part of the world it became harder to imagine that the pain you faced was unique and in need of special attention, and as a result crying for yourself felt indulgent unless you could pretend that nobody else existed, or that your own pain was different and more exceptional, and to do this perhaps it was easier if you found somewhere to be completely alone.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Being close to someone meant the entire rhythm of that person’s life was synchronized with yours, it meant that each body had learned how to respond to the other instinctually, to its gestures and mannerisms, to the subtle changes in the cadence of its speech and gait, so that all the movements of one person had gradually come to be in subconscious harmony with those of the other.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Thoughts, feelings, and conjectures, stories, jokes, and slander were nothing but thinly spun threads that tied the insides of people together long after speaking had ended, so that communities were nothing more than humans held together in this way, in large, intricate, imperceptible webs whose function was not so much to restrict movement as to connect each individual to every other.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“But if they couldn’t talk about their pasts, what could they say to each other at all, given that there was no future for them to speak of either?”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Didn’t dying in the end mean being separated from other humans, after all, from the sea of human gaits, gestures, noises, and gazes in which for so many years one had floated, didn’t it mean abandoning the possibility of connecting with another human that being among others always afforded? Unless, on the other hand, dying meant being separated from oneself above all, being separated from all the intimate personal details that had come to constitute one’s life. If that was the case then surely he should try instead to be alone, should spend his remaining time committing to memory the shape of his hands and feet, the texture of his hair, fingernails and teeth, appreciating for a last time the sound of his own breathing, the sensation of his chest expanding and contracting. What dying meant there was no way he could really know of course, it was a subject he was not in a position to think about clearly. It depended probably on what living meant, and though he had been alive for some time it was difficult to remember whether it had meant being together with other humans, or being alone with himself above all.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Conversation was like an unspooling of invisible fiber that was shot into the air as a stream of sound, that entered the bodies of other people through their ears, that went from those humans to others, and from them to yet more. Thoughts, feelings, and conjectures, stories, jokes, and slander were nothing but thinly spun threads that tied the insides of people together long after speaking had ended, so that communities were nothing more than humans held together in this way, in large, intricate, imperceptible webs whose function was not so much to restrict movement as to connect each individual to every other. Needing such a connection people would always find a way to talk, if they could. It was not for this reason that those in the camp had ceased speaking but because, rather, there was simply no longer anything for them to say. The diaphanous threads which in ordinary life had been so easily spun had been dissolved now, leaving nothing left to unspool, and each and every person in the camp had to sit silently alone, lost inside themselves, unable, in any way, to connect. Ganga”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Story of a Brief Marriage

“Wherever they were headed in particular, though, in a general sense people were always either moving towards their homes or away, either directly or by means of intermediate destinations.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Most children have two whole legs and two whole arms but this little six-year-old that Dinesh was carrying had already lost one leg, the right one from the lower thigh down, and was now about to lose his right arm.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“perhaps it was similar to how, when playing sports, you could never really give up or resign yourself to losing right till the very end. Even if you knew you were going to lose, even if you had long given up trying, the fact of defeat always dawned on you newly and almost incredibly when the final whistle was blown or wicket taken, the warm shiver of recognition that you’d failed sank in only after the match was lost, once everything was over, sometimes only several hours later,”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Breathing silently in and silently out, curling up his body and hunching in his shoulders and head, Dinesh felt a long, wide fatigue sweeping over him, washing over his loosened limbs. Falling asleep was, in a way, the closest a person could come to renouncing the world outside them while still alive, and it was a strange thing therefore that in order to sleep one still needed to be in a safe and comforting place, one needed something reliable in the outside world to be able to hold on to or at least to touch, like an anchored boat to which a diver is attached as he descends into the sea, reassured that there is something on the surface that he can return to when the time comes.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Story of a Brief Marriage

“In a strange way it would be pleasant to leave and then return, Dinesh felt, to come back and find her still lying there, safely and peacefully, breathing slowly in and out beside the rock. Just as coming home from school or work in the past he would notice certain small, inconspicuous changes around the house, that ether was now a letter on the table, that the windows had been opened or shut, or that wet clothes were hanging on the clothesline, and feel reassured somehow by these signs this his life was part of something larger that had its own momentum and energy, something with its own separate impulse for movement, in the same way it would be gratifying to return to the clearing after his bath and find that Ganga had gone on existing there without hum, that independently of him her small chest had continued rising an falling, that the faint vessels beneath he skin continued their delicate pulsing.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“because tears for oneself could only come when one ignored the suffering of everybody else, or pretended at least that it was not significant.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“in crying for yourself you were acknowledging your vulnerability, acknowledging that despite your various efforts and postures you can be and have been hurt by the world.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“Happiness and sadness are for people who can control what happens to them.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“What it would be like to be separated from all these things he did not know, but the more he dwelled on it the more he understood that it was not so much fear of being separated that he felt as sadness at the idea of parting.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage

“There was, always, before the shelling, for the slenderest moment before the earth began shaking, a faraway whispering, as of air hurtling at high speed through a thin tube, a whooshing, which turned, indiscernibly, into a whistling. This whistling lasted for a while, and then, no matter where you stood, there was a tremulous vibration, the trembling of the earth underfoot, followed by a blast of hot air against the skin, and then finally the deafening explosion. It was a loud, unbearably loud explosion, followed immediately by others, so loud that as soon as the first one came the rest could no longer be heard. They could be registered only as the pervasive absence of sound, as a series of voids or vacuums in the sound sphere so great that not even the sound of thinking could be heard.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Story of a Brief Marriage