A Passage North Quotes

“We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon, see life as divided into what lies on this side of that horizon and what lies on the other, as if we only had to reach that horizon and fall into it in order for everything to change, in order to once and for all transcend the world as we have known it, though in the end this transcendence never actually comes, of course, a fact one began to appreciate only as one got older, when one realized there was always more life on the other side of desire's completion, that there was always waking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends, when one realized that one can never truly touch the horizon because life always goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one's life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“It was strange how sometimes scenes one has never witnessed could appear before the mind’s eye more profoundly than memories from actual life,”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“The present, we assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted. It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“There was a tendency, he knew, when thinking about people from the past, to believe that they’d remained the same while you yourself had evolved,”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“He couldn't help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he'd traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he'd been advancing not from the island's south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“It was the kind of deep, unspoken resentment that was only possible between people who loved each other intensely and yet sensed the possibility of being hurt by each other, between people who needed each other and were yet unable to fully acknowledge this need to each other for fear of becoming vulnerable. It was a form of cruelty common in families and close friendships, where people are so dependent on each other but also so hemmed in and restricted by each other, and it was a form of cruelty that was an intrinsic part of the dynamic between lovers too.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“It was the fact, above all, that sudden or violent deaths could occur not merely in a war zone or during race riots but during the slow, unremarkable course of everyday life that made them so disturbing and so difficult to accept, as though the possibility of death was contained in even the most routine of actions, in even the ordinary, unnoticed moments of life.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“To yearn on the other hand was to be lost, to lack bearings in the world because one did not know what one was seeking or where it could be found, so that unable to distract oneself, by frenetic activity or single-minded pursuit, from the painful sense of lack, one’s only consolation was to look out across vast distances, as if surely somewhere in the expansiveness of the horizon, across space and sea and sky, some possibility was contained that could make life self-sufficient and devoid of need, some possibility that could bring an end to time.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“The freedom that Kuttimani desired, the freedom that perhaps all liberation movements sought, was not just the freedom that came when one could move freely over the land on which one’s forbears lived, not just the freedom that came from being able to choose and be responsible for one’s own life, but the freedom that came when one had access to a horizon, when one felt that the possible worlds that glimmered at its edges were within one’s reach.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“sense of having a destiny in that place he’d never actually lived, fantasizing about what it would be like to walk over the same land his forebears had, to help create out of near annihilation the possibility of some new and compelling future, as though living a life simplified in the way that only war can simplify he too would be able to find something worth surrendering to.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“It was as if, at such times, he was permanently suspended in the blissful but always vanishing space between desire and satisfaction. In that region of the self that one is no longer anguished by the absence of something one feels to be necessary for one's salvation but not yet saddened by the disappointment that attainment of desire always seemed to bring. For strong desire, desire that radiates outward through all the regions of the body, always seemed to involve the hope or belief that attainment of the object of desire whether a person, place, or situation will change everything completely, will end all absence and yearning, all effort and struggle. That it will stem somehow the slow sad passage of time.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“It no longer mattered whether Rani's death had been planned or accidental, Krishan understood now, there didn't need to be a sharp line between these two kinds of death, a meticulous plan wasn't necessary for a death to have been intended.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“Krishan had always thought of death as something that happened suddenly or violently, an event that took place at a specific time and then was over, but thinking now of his grandmother as he sat there on the rocks, it struck him that death could also be a long, dranw-out process, a process that took up a significant portion of the life of the dying person.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“And yet there was a crucial distinction, Krishan knew, between the forgetting that takes place as a result of our consent, which is a forgetting we need in order to reconcile our pasts and presents, and the forgetting that is imposed on us against our own will, which is so often a way of forcing us to accept a present in which we do not want to partake.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“It had been in those months of waiting probably that he'd first become aware of the absence inside him, the longing for a life that existed beyond the boundaries of the Colombo and Sri Lanka he knew, an absence that he hadn't felt as an absence so much as a kind of willingness to be drawn elsewhere, an absence that made him, paradoxically, more present to the world around him, more delicately aware of its surfaces and textures and moods.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“In Delhi and many of the Hindi-speaking states more generally male stares were different, were intensely unselfconscious and intensely unrelenting, so that even when you weren't being harassed in more explicit verbal or physical ways you still had to use all of your psychological resources to resist these gazes over the course of each day, to prevent these men from trying to enter your soul through your eyes, like strangers who enter the privacy of your house without permission and without even bothering to take off their shoes. You had to employ these psychological resources so constantly over the course of the day, losing even the freedom to think autonomously in your own mind, that by the time you returned home you were always utterly exhausted. The cumulative effect of years of being subject to these gazes was that women who lived in the capital had learned to curb the movement of their own eyes to remarkable degrees, restricting their gazes in public spaces to areas where their eyes couldn't be intercepted, toward their feet or their laps or into the screen of their phones...”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“The specific path a life took was often decided in ways that were easy to discern, it was true, in the situation into which one was born, one’s race and gender and caste, in all the desires, aspirations, and narratives that one came thereafter to identify with, but people also carried deeper, more clandestine trajectories inside their bodies, their origins often unknown or accidental, their modes of operation invisible to the eye, trajectories which were sometimes strong enough to push people in certain directions despite everything that took place on the surface of their lives.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“There was something about twilight that heightened his anxiety, which brought it to the surface of his consciousness and made it palpable, as though with the gradual disappearance of the horizon the last hopes and promises of the day too were disappearing from view, another day coming and going with nothing to show for itself.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“To desire, in a sense, was to know or think one knew what one wanted, to know or think one knew the paths by which it might be reached, even if those paths turned out to be too difficult to follow, even if the things they led to, the things one desired, turned out not to provide the liberation one thought.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“There was a difference between the pleasure that soothed and lulled one to sleep and pleasure that drew the self more widely and vividly into the world, and thinking of his return to Colombo now it seemed to him, as he stood there in front of the window that something vital had been lost over the course of the pervious year, the sense so strong for most of his twenties that his life could be part of some larger thing, part of some movement or vision to which he could give himself up.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North: A Novel

“Anjum had told him at length much later about what it was like for women to move through public spaces in Delhi, about how the gaze of men in Delhi seemed to lack a kind of shame, there was no other explanation, she felt, for the persistence with which men of all classes would try, simply by staring, to pull the inner life out from inside the woman who was their object of interest.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“For a long time the horror that these images elicited remained buried inside him. A morbid reality he was constantly feeding and yet he was unable to express. As though unable to fully believe or understand what they depicted. It was only when the channel 4 documentary came out in 2011, accusing the government of war crimes and genocide, when later that year the UN published its report, giving an estimate of how many civilians had died that he was finally able to speak about what had happened. To accept that the images he had become obsessed with were not some strange perverted creation of his subconscious life but they represented things that had really happened in the country he was from. Even now he felt ashamed thinking about his reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war. As though he had been hesitating to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor violated stateless people were the ones alleging it. As though he was unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the panel of foreign authority experts, legitimised by a documentary, narrated by a clean shaven white man standing in front of a camera in suit and tie.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“They sat there watching in silence till the very end, listening to the music that played as the credits rolled, and when the video at last came to an end, Anjum closed the laptop gently and they both remained unmoving for a while, reluctant to speak or look at each other in the same way that when a film ended at the cinema and the lights came on, there was a moment in which you were reluctant to make eye contact with the person beside you, as if to do so would be to acknowledge the transience of the world in which you'd just been immersed.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“Listening to the sounds breaking gently against the rocks, the birds flapping their wings against the push of the warm breeze, he gradually became less restive, the present ceasing to be a void and becoming instead, for a short period of time, a place he could inhabit comfortably and securely. There were few moods that could persist after all when one was in full view of earth and sky, and even the more deep-seated moods that maintained themselves in the chest against all the conflicting feelings that came one's way while out in the world- even these moods thinned slowly into nothingness when confronted by the immensity of the horizon, so that one could feel, at such moments, if not satisfaction or contentment then the peace at least of a brief inner extinction.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“the story of Kuttimani’s death told in the seventh chapter is based on Rajan Hoole’s account in The Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence, and Murder; the documentary described in chapter nine is Beate Arnestad and Morten Daae’s My Daughter the Terrorist; the account in chapter nine of Buddhist women’s poetry is based on a translation from the Pali by Charles Hallisey.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“We can direct our gazes toward what lies in the distance whenever we want, toward things that have nothing to do with us and lack the power to affect us, but usually we can hear only what is in our vicinity and has the potential to affect us, so that sound, unlike sight, was associated with the physical presence of a thing and the possibility of interaction with it. It was for this reason perhaps that ghosts and spirits and phantoms were so often depicted as silent presences in films and books, as beings we can glimpse but cannot hear, that can watch but cannot speak, as though to signify that while these beings are in some way present to us they cannot participate in our world, no longer have the power to act and affect us, just as we ourselves are present in some way to them but cannot engage in the world to which they have been cast.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“They wanted some kind of verdict on their disappeared sons, husbands, and brothers so they could finally have a measure of peace, one of the women was telling the reporter, so that they could conclusively learn what had happened to the people they loved. Rani had turned to him after the segment was over and told him, shaking her head, that she was grateful for having seen her dead sons’ bodies, for having managed to hold the younger one in her arms for a few seconds, that she didn’t know what she would have done had either of them suddenly gone missing one day, had she been forced to live in uncertainty about whether they were alive or dead. When you didn’t see and hold the body of a dead child you couldn’t understand that they were gone, she told him, and unlike her the relatives of people who’d gone missing were forced as a result to live their lives in a kind of suspended state,”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“some forms of violence could penetrate so deeply into the psyche that there was simply no question of fully recovering. Recovery was something that would take decades, which even then would be partial and ambiguous, and if he wanted to help in a meaningful way it would have to be in a way that was sustainable for him in the long term, without having to abandon all his needs for its sake.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“deaths could occur not merely in a war zone or during race riots but during the slow, unremarkable course of everyday life that made them so disturbing and so difficult to accept, as though the possibility of death was contained in even the most routine of actions, in even the ordinary, unnoticed moments of life.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North