Gold Diggers Quotes

“Colonization of India was primarily economic,” a professor lectured in college, which made the whole thing sound like the Brits had merely pickpocketed a few wallets. But in the gold digger, see the emasculation of colonization. The only way out is as an export. Through the porthole, his motherland shrinks.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“We were both conceptual orphans. Perhaps that is the condition of any second generation. In the space between us and the rest of adulthood lay a great expanse of the unknown. We had not grown up imbibing stories that implicitly conveyed answers to the basic questions of being: What did it feel like to fall in love in America, to take oneself for granted in America? Starved as we were for clues about how to live, we would grip like mad on to anything that lent a possible way of being.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers

“I looked at her and thought it seemed less that things had been lost than that they were being found, over and over again.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers

“You would have had to forgive people, if you’d gone on, I wrote. You would have had to believe that idiots grow up and change. You would have had to be big enough to accept that, or the bitterness might have eroded you. But you would have. You would have found a way to be generous to everyone who was never generous to you. You would have figured out that thing historians and politicians and all the world today is struggling with—the moral weight of the past, how to hold it.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers

“This was what it felt like growing up. Adults and kids constantly gossiping about one another, judging whether or not you were Indian enough, using I don’t know what kind of standards. And at that point, it’s worse than gossip. It’s actually part of what I wrote my thesis about, at Stanford—because I went back, by the way, and graduated magna cum laude.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“I had never much cared about ancestry the way my parents spoke of it when we went back to India. There, ancestry meant unpronounceable names and impenetrable orthodoxies. But this gold digger felt viscerally like my forebear. What if this was my land, after all?”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“Perhaps it was not frightening to find one’s mind unmoored from time and place; perhaps it was freeing to leave yourself behind.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers

“You couldn’t call him fresh off the boat—he was fresh off a private jet, you know? Jimmy—that’s his name, Jimmy—just waltzed into Stanford and owned the place. Me along with it. He believed in me, you know? I was overwhelmed there—everyone was so smart—and he still looked at me and said I could be someone.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“What they say about addicts: in the end, the brain is fried, and the daily dramas of life become doldrums. But sitting in the Sonora, with Anita’s gaze haloing me for the first time in years, a glimmer of all that returned, and it felt like grace.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“They are the same sort who developed a protocol for lynching disruptive blacks and Mexicans and Chileans and Native Americans. They are the same sort who will, in another few decades, form a mob in Oregon to murder more than thirty Chinese miners; the same sort who will, soon after that, chase throngs of Sikhs from Washington.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“Quitting debate, it was judged, would sabotage my college chances, so my parents reluctantly released me into the nonsense-filled outside world. And how nonsensical that summer was! Wendi Zhao wrangled a job at the camp, teaching admiring ninth graders.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“It’s history,” I said. “They’d be happier if it was computer science, or finance, or something more lucrative. Right now, I’m a little… outside their fold.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“When it came my turn, I spoke of academic and familial pressures and Asian emasculation. She’d nodded as I wrapped up the perfunctory revelations and told me that she “lived entirely with people who identified as hyphenated in college” and therefore “got it.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“Man, but you’re Muslim. What if they don’t want to be in your prayers?” “I think they’ll understand, dude,” Abel said softly. “It all goes to the same place.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“I’d become a committed Young Democrat, at least on paper. Though I spent my days throwing around the language of policy and politics, I practiced agility more than advocacy: in one round, I played the neoconservative defender of American imperial policy in Afghanistan; in the next, I argued for diplomacy with rogue states.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“I have my own business. And I have a daughter who I get along with, or who doesn’t hate me, which is more than I can say for most of the other immigrant mothers around here, isn’t it?”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“Have you only been stealing from Indians?” “Who else has good gold?” she said. “White people make and buy shoddy stuff. Ten-, fourteen-karat—you’re a boy, you won’t understand this.”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“Anjali grew up flitting about with friends in the housing society, playing with her two older brothers when they were free, reading English novels. She did fine in school, though not spectacularly, and no one told her to put in more work. There was an understanding: her brothers were to one day become somebodies; she”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland

“Bombay, a city where Gujaratis and Maharashtrians and Tamilians and Parsis become Bombaykars, allegiances shifted to contemporary urban existence rather than to the regions that created them. The Joshis considered themselves modern, but in one respect they rang a bit of the bygone days: the parents—an excise tax officer and a housewife”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland