And the Walls Come Crumbling Down Quotes

“Platitudes are poor substitutes for emotions, this negative space hollowed out and without words. I know the shape of you and it has no name. I know the sound of you and the smell of you and the touch and sight and taste of you. But language departed the same day you did, leaving my mouth empty.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“Coming home to someone is many things. It is a literal action, an abstract idea, a physical feeling. It is more than the sound of the key turning in the door and the voice that calls from the porch. It is a choice, a promise, a declaration. It is a return, not as a person to a place, but as oneself to another. It is one person saying to another person: You are the one I choose.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“Notions of family are so fragile, everyone wants to own them. Religion. Culture. Conservatives. Liberals. No matter which camp is talking about it, family becomes the moral microcosm of what constitutes a good life.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“I am a wall. I am a wall. I am a wall. I am a giant and I tower above you. I am a giant and I can't hear your voice. There is familiarity in this. I spent years like this growing up, my mother hovering over my every move, me responding monosyllabically, face blank, voice blank, heart blank. It is a coping mechanism and it is easy, if you are able to block out false promises of love with the understanding of what love has become.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“When public housing grew to be the nation's highest priority, the need to fit everyone into state-sanctioned boxes became a task of the highest order. No more of these zinc-roofed monstrosities parading as households. Not to mention those attap-walled nooks hanging off the edges of shorelines. How to maintain security when you could pick the padlock on any one of these doors and barge your way into someone else's life.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“During my frequent house-moving, I came to understand how this city has no patience for those who cannot, or do not wish to, acclimatise to change. You like old neighbourhoods, un-renovated housing, nature growing wild? Good luck. You want to live a simple life outside of cheques and balances? Just try. Technology will urge itself into your pockets. Highways will encroach upon your gardens. Luxury housing will impress itself upon your land and upon the cemeteries of your ancestors. Prices will skyrocket out of your control and if you're not working, always working, urge you back into your parents' homes, or out into the streets.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“What would eventually crumble his walls was time. Time eating into stones with its insistent teeth. The wind-affirming impermanence with its constant seduction. The sun chasing ancient insects into cracks, rocks coercing them into fossils. Time wearing away his fortress in the only way that time exhibits its linearity. Walls resist. Time insists. Both persists. But the walls still crumbles.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“A wall may be a single plane but it is characterised by its duality. It defines a space by dividing it. It brings together but keeps apart. It is passive offence but active defence.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“I have grown so used to raised tents and evictions that I disguise my moving boxes as furniture. This way, if I am forced to leave in a hurry, I am packed before I even have to go. Look at them, propping up desks and night-stands, disguised in blankets and shawls. If the next place I find cannot accommodate my belongings, I learn to do without them. When the need for basic shelter eventually takes over the attachment of meanings to objects, sentiment is the first to go. No longer can one attach memories to monuments, or affection to architecture. Emptying the house cannot involve emptying the heart when one has to do it so often.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“The movers arrive at my new apartment as I close the door on this chapter. And just as this story started with you, so it shall end. May it cut through kilometres to find you. May it shelter you from the rain. May it find you nestled at the end of my voice.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

“Perhaps observations of nature are the reason we've spun strong conceptions of love and family impossible to follow through on, into tales that govern our lives. Some radar that leaves us always either searching or settling for what we believe we long for. Something burned into parts of our brains; into the parts of our hearts that still wish to belong.”
― Tania De Rozario, And the Walls Come Crumbling Down