The Startup Wife Quotes

“Did I regret Cyrus’s whiteness? Truth be told, sometimes I did. If Cyrus was Bengali, I wouldn’t have to explain why chewing on the end of a drumstick was perhaps the best part of a meal, or why there were outside clothes and inside clothes and in-between clothes that you wore when you got home but weren’t ready for bed. I wouldn’t have to explain all the complicated rules about where you can and can’t put your feet, and that he could maybe kiss me in front of my parents but not on the mouth and certainly never with tongue. But what I found infinitely worse was trying to gauge whether a man had just the right amount of brown in him. He had to know about drumsticks and shoes and not hate himself, but he also couldn’t be too in love with his mother or imagine that I would change more diapers than him or ever, ever be charmed by the thought of me in a hijab. He had to be three parts Tagore, one part Drake, one part e e cummings, and that’s not even getting into whether I got a rise from smelling his face. So no, I didn’t want to ponder Cyrus’s whiteness, I just wanted to enjoy his scent and his perfectly sized dick and the fact that, of all the people I had ever met in my whole life, he felt the most like home.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“all the great love stories are about two people bringing the story of their yesterdays and the story of their todays into one epic sewn-together poem, and that is what they mean when they say lightning strikes.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I’m stammering now, but I keep going. “ ‘He’s otherworldly but handsome in an almost comical way. His sentences are long, and when you’re in the middle of one, you wonder, where is this going? But he always manages to bring whatever he’s saying to a satisfying conclusion. Everything he says is mysterious and somehow obvious at the same time.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Technology allows us to stop doing the things we no longer wish to do. Like hailing a taxi on the street or sending faxes. Nobody wants to confront death. And now we don’t have to.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Every injustice was authored by me, every wound nudged by my hand, even if he bore the knife. I opened my shirt and he cut me.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Marco is deeply damanged, anyone could see that, but you blew smoke in people’s eyes and they didn’t have the balls to call you on it. Not even Jules.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Cyrus, there’s a weird virus out there and we almost blew up our company. You’re really going to leave me here to clean up your mess while you fuck off to the beach?”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I can’t stay here,” he says. “I need to think. I need to try to figure some things out. How I got to this place. Something happened to me and I need to fix it. There’s an ashram in Mysore.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“thought we were parting ways on ideological grounds, but really, it was my shortsightedness, my inability to see that she was fundamentally right and I was wrong. I gave up my life’s greatest gift—my closest human connection—because I was unable to see the higher truth in another person’s vision.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“They were overtly progressive—the Woodstock of the internet, we were told. But at the end of the day, they’re all the same—the whole sector needs to be regulated.” The presenter nods, citing all the ways we had sold people”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I never wanted any of this in the first place. I was perfectly happy living my medium-size life when you came along and forced me to become Cyrus the Great. And now you resent me.” “That’s bullshit and you know it. You enjoyed every minute of it.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“The truth. Which is that you’re pimping something your wife invented and peddling it as your own.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I think what our guest is trying to say is, do you feel like maybe he’s hogging the limelight? He does talk about you a lot in this article that just came out, doesn’t he? About how crazy he is about you. But not as much about how you built the tech.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I try to enjoy it, but I suspect it’s one big consolation prize when what I actually deserve is a seat at the table. But I never dwell on this thought for very long.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“You give us permission to access all your social media accounts in the event of your death,” Marco says. “We close things down, write to all your friends, inform everyone about your final wishes. It’s like a will, except for your online presence.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“The thing is, we talk about people working themselves to death, but we never say ‘He hobbied himself to death.’ Still, there must be a lot of people who do that.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Oh, there’s none of that,” Craig says. “The cuddle puddle is a strictly non-penetrative ritual.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“They do not want to try the latest skin-firming cream, they are not interested in celebrity gossip. They do not bow to influencers because we don’t give them any. They are the curious, the wondering and wandering, hungering for connection, searching for meaning. They are the best of us. And we give them a place to be those people.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Now it’s too late—the cult of Cyrus has begun, and although I have a seat at the table, it isn’t my table, it’s his. His and Rupert’s and all the other men who are going to fund the business.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“The number of times I brushed off some sexist or racist comment, thinking, well, that guy’s a product of his generation, he didn’t mean it—each of those times, I knew I was giving a free pass to someone who did not deserve it, but I didn’t have the confidence to call him out.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“She is flanked by two white women, both sporting the kind of calm confidence and grooming that comes from being older, wiser, and richer than everyone else in the room.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“You and Jules know what WAI is about—it’s not about making money. It’s about giving people a safe place, a community. We promised them that. For you to renege on that promise is unacceptable to me. And hurtful.” “No one is”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I knew it!” Craig says. “You look like a hippie, but you’re a fucking ninja.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“You have to crush the church, and you have to kill Facebook. You’re like a church/Facebook mash-up. You gotta kill both of those guys.” “I think, realistically, we would get a decent amount of growth even if we didn’t try to compete with Jesus or Zuckerberg.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Did you know,” Jules tells us, “that there are entire warehouses full of people in the Philippines who are hired just to sift through the human trash that’s put out on Facebook? I mean, all day long people have to look at photos of the kinds of dark shit you and I don’t even have the words to describe, and they have to scrub all of it from the pretty blue-and-white-bannered site so that we can believe we live in a world of unicorns and cupcakes.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I can’t help but feel like every little success is a small fuck-you to all the people who glanced ugly at my mother in her sari in Walmart, or mispronounced my name even though it was only four letters long, or said something casually racist and then said, “But I don’t mean you.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“And they talk about Cyrus. Is Cyrus a shaman or a priest? Philosopher or prophet? Friend? Charlatan? Cult leader? Visionary?”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Isn’t it obvious? Daddy issues, abandonment—my mother was desperate for male attention, my father was absent when he was present, and then one day he was actually”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I didn’t want to make a big deal about it. I wanted him to respect you on your own terms. Not just as my wife.” “What if he saw you just as my husband?” “I wish the world worked that way, but it doesn’t.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“You could be right,” Rupert says, “but we scored a goal from midfield, and I’m not going to let you tell me I was offside the whole time.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife