Friend of My Youth Quotes

“This is what's beautiful about staying in a club or hotel: you're invisible, as is your neighbour.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“Fantasists aren't natural readers. They grow restive easily.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“... "shagging" - a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“Photographers are the new Brahmins: we have no volition when they rule us.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“At the conclusion of Hollywood disaster movies and epics, time moves backward, piecing together like a jigsaw the elements that had come apart. The Titanic resumes its journey; Russell Crowe is reunited with his murdered wife and son. It's not a happy ending; it's a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“He has a traditional shopper's DNA, an eye for freshness and appearance, and a consistent sense of a home to go back to.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“Only drunks stare at statues .... I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“I ... take a selfie with him; two, to be safe. My lips are parted, as if I'm poking a dead thing to see if it'll come to life; it's the phone I'm attempting to keep at a distance. He's smiling faintly, as if amuse by some exotic piece of wildlife.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“Frame after aluminium frame had replaced the casements. The gesture by which you push a window open was now unnecessary. ... It was as if a part of us that was air and breeze had been denied entry.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth