Too Much and Not the Mood Quotes

“Nook people are those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Change, I've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“There’s strength in observing one’s miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn’t smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. Memory isn’t a well but an offshoot. It goes secretly. Comes apart. Deceives. It’s guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you’ve emotionalized.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Even when I was nothing, I was arriving.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“To this day, watching a woman mindlessly tend to one thing while doing something else absorbs me. Like securing the backs of her earrings while wiggling her feet into her shoes. Like staring into some middle distance, where lines soften, and where she separates the relevant from the immaterial.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Then again, maybe that’s why I’m drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“A distinguishing quality of the women I love, meaning, none of us are bothered by how infrequently we see one another. We have an arrangement that was never formally arranged. A consideration for turning down invitations. We are happy for the person who is indulging in her space, and how she might merely be spending the weekend unescorted by anything except her work, which could also mean: she is in no rush to complete much. She is tinkering. She is gathering all the materials necessary for repotting a plant but not doing it. She is turning off the lights and climbing into her head because that’s usually the move.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Women who are in no rush to respond to a world that’s only conceived them as its consequence.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“A woman carries her inner life - lugs it around or holds it in fumes that both poison and bless her - while nourishing another's inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“The best ideas outrun me. That’s why I write.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“A nook person finds the dog at the party; drinks wine from a mug; sits on the floor and braids carpet tassels only to become self-conscious and unbraid them.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“I don’t require much to feel far-removed; to impose my wanderings on what’s close. Because of this, my friend and I have started calling ourselves nook people. Those of us who seek corners and bays in order to redeploy our hearts and not break the mood. Those of us who retreat in order to cubicle our flame. Who collect sea glass. Who value a deep pants pocket. Who are our own understudies and may as well have shadowboxes for brains.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Because there is trust too, in feeling small.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“At any rate, isn’t it lovely to, once in a while, feel small in the presence of your friend? Awed. Fortunate to experience nearness that calls upon space.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“If you share too much of yourself, you risk growing into someone who has nothing unacknowledged.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Writing is a closed pistachio shell.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“There's a type of inborn initiative that comes from having never been obligated to answer questions about one's name, or one's country of so-called origin, or to explain the way you look is generationally and geographically worlds apart from where you were born. Since childhood, there's been this assumption that I owe strangers an answer when they inquire about matters I myself struggle to have words for, let alone understand.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Nook people express appreciation in the moment by maintaining how much we will miss what is presently happening. Our priorities are spectacularly disordered. A nook person might spend the last few years of her twenties thinking she is dying. Convinced of it. Nook”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“She is all at once unused but oh, so used up. Or very used to. Why is it that when a woman is occupied by the voice in her head, or the wear of her day, or the landscape that passes through her eyes like windows on a train, the world assumes she is up for grabs? A vacant stare does not mean vacancy.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Isn’t it fun to read a sentence that races ahead of itself?”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“It’s an elbow propped on the edge of a table when you’re wrapping up an argument, or to signify you’re just getting started. An elbow propped on the edge of a table is an adverb.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment. Letting form pass through you.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“First love is all sensation and ambient zooms, and letting the world ebb. Like writing, occasionally, it feels combustive. Greedy. It’s unsophisticated and coaxes you into making promises about the far future and imbibing the moment. Into growing gullible fast, frantically so, and forgetting about yourself—about your exception. Writing does the same. It lays siege.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Until you write what is detectable but dislodges you. Like the smell of cinnamon.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Resurfacing is nonpareil. And splitting a sandwich with someone you’ve said maybe two words to all morning is idyllic.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“A woman carries her inner life—lugs it around or holds it in like fumes that both poison and bless her—while nourishing another’s inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays