Lucky Boy Quotes

“And good intentions? These scared him the most: people with good intentions tended not to question themselves. And people who didn't question themselves, in the scientific world and beyond, were the ones to watch out for.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“Sometimes the things that happen can be changed. Sometimes they cannot. Which time is this?”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“Immigrants were supposed to own things quietly. Proclaiming themselves invited the wrong kind of attention, from the evil eye to more immediate retribution. The surest sign of an immigrant business was an American flag on the door.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“But no matter what, strangers never disappointed, because she expected nothing from them. It was the people she knew, who liked and even loved her, who could let her down most cruelly.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“Most parents worry. Most parents worry from day one that their child will stop breathing, that their child will fall out of bed, be crushed in the night by a falling light fixture or sat on by a cat. Most parents experience the worry and push their way through it, so that by the time they’re parents of two-year-olds or three-year-olds, individuals who really are capable of destroying themselves, they’ve learned not to worry. Even when they should. Rishi, however, was a newly born parent, and fearful. Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe it was fear that turned him, that early August morning, into a father.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“Her mind was made up. Had Michelangelo tried dentistry before he painted the Sistine ceiling? Had Joan of Arc weighed the pros and cons of listening to her angels? Did the Queen of England send out résumés, in case something better came up?”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“To love profoundly, and be loved. To shape her own blood and body into sparkling new life. She could be home to someone, a safe and soft place in a world of ragged edges. She could teach a little boy, a little girl, how to make their way.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“Soli looked up to the sky. Same blue as the Mexican sky. She looked through the truck's slats. This was California. The United States of America. She had arrived.

And here's what she discovered. This place, this America? This new place, this streets-of-gold place? Looked a hell of lot like the old place.

America streaked by her, stripped and tender with heat. She watched it all rush past through the slats of the old truck: the tin roofs, seas of broken glass, glinting and breathless like a fever dream. America was the dust in her hair, the wind in her throat, the sun that shouted against her eyelids. Between the slates of this truck, America was nothing but a high-tech, high-speed dream of trees and houses and fences, a sliver of interrupted light.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“If this is a story, it’s one with no right ending. If this is a dream, it is a dream made solid, a dream grown to a little boy with a waist and shoulders, calves that wrap around his mother’s hips. They”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“But very small things could be a big deal within the very small orbits on which they spin.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“Ignacio climbed into his lap and examined his face. It was a relief to be in a child’s world, where kindness was the standard operating mode, where clarity was the order of the day, and adult posturing kept its distance. Hearings”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“Patience was the act of holding impatience at bay, of keeping it, like an impudent lover, from wearing her down.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“It seems the big things--war, famine, the economy--get left to work themselves out. It's the crumbs that are picked up and examined, that delineate the path of a struggle.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“She'd built her love on a fault line, and the first tremors had begun.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“Outside the prison walls, the world continued its drunken surge, teetering, as ever, on the brink of ruination. Arabs revolted, and Americans. Drones like alien saucers flew overhead, manned with cameras. Americans still raged against Muslims, until they grew tired of raging against Muslims and switched to Mexicans or anyone resembling a Mexican, including Muslims. Hurricanes disappeared entire islands, palm trees bent in the raging winds. Villages vanished under mudslides. On land, grown women were dying their hair purple, and hipsters walked the streets of San Francisco, wearing sleeves of embedded ink up their arms. Iran enriched uranium and pundits worried, and China had more money than God, and the iPhone was making everything better and everything worse, and birds were angry and pigs thieving. Superheroes were back, all over the place, in every theater, because they were needed. The free people outside the prison walls needed supermen and wonder women to wrench them from the ditch they'd dug, arms flailing, bodies sinking into the squelching soil.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“When you have just one possession, you guard it with your life. The you that once centered your universe becomes nothing but a keeper of the one precious thing. As the weeks passed and Ignacio proved increasingly that he would live, Soli's fear shifted to the newly formed knowledge that she was now tied more fiercely to fate and luck than she'd ever been before. Having a child was like turning inside out and exposing to the world the soft pulp of her heart.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“When you have just one possession, you guard it with your life. The you that once centered your universe becomes nothing but a keeper of the one precious thing. As the weeks passed and Ignacio proved increasingly that he would life, Soli's fear shifted to the newly formed knowledge that she was now tied more fiercely to fate and luck than she'd ever been before. Having a child was like turning inside out and exposing to the world the soft pulp of her heart.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“A new life would begin--possibly a very good or even a better life--but before it did, he and Kavya would have to journey there; they would cross a no-man's-land of uncertainty, parched and dark and crawling with vigilantes. The possibility of emerging unscathed felt slim. The search for a child would take them through stifling obscurity, and already Rishi was finding it hard to breathe.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“And amid the uncertainty of new motherhood, the sleepless fog that hung over her days, Soli felt, at last, that she had a home. Motherhood was her dwelling, the boy at her breast her hearth.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“This much she'd learned: Strangers could astonish with their kindness. Strangers could be savage. But no matter what, strangers never disappointed, because she expected nothing from them. It was the people she knew, who liked and even loved her, who could let her down most cruelly. And she could let them down, too.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“It occurred to him, pulling into the nearly empty expanse, that perhaps the father-son bond was an impossibility that no series of trials and recalculations could surmount. Ignacio was simply not his child, and while Rishi could provide for him the best of all resources, he wouldn't feel the pull of fatherhood that he'd always expected. Maybe, he thought, this was how all fathers secretly felt. Maybe only mothers needed children.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“But Soli. Poor Soli. Soli met and loved and lost her man in a matter of seven days, and before she could learn that he had a villainous mother or waxy ears or an insurmountable fear of bees, he was gone. She fell in love with the pure essence of Checo the train rider, Checo the pioneer. And before she could settle into the normalcy of their attachment, he had vanished among dust clouds and a spray of bullets. Whether he'd made it to safety or fallen there on the valley floor, Soli could not know.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“There were things she couldn't know about being a parent without being one - this she sensed from the way men and women with children in tow seemed to have little to say to her. Parenthood was a members-only organization closed to freelancers and temps. Outsiders could visit for lunch, but they tended to leave quickly, overwhelmed by the demands of belonging. But Kavya didn't want to leave. Kavya wanted in.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“But the uncertainty of Soli's happiness remained, a permanent raised eyebrow on the face of the great green woman she'd equated with America, the supposed mother of exiles.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“People with good intentions tended not to question themselves. And people who didn’t question themselves, in the scientific world and beyond, were the ones to watch out for. That”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

“This thing, growing inside and filling her breasts with promise, this thing was the same as her. It matched her better than anything or anyone she'd known.”
― Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy