The Vibrant Years Quotes

“Oh, to have the confidence of a mediocre man.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“Why are we supposed to be ashamed of our own nakedness? Doesn’t that turn the vessel we live in, our most precious possession, into an ugly secret?”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“I’d rather have a large life than a long one.” It was a line from a film Bhanu loved. No life could be large in its entirety. Even a life that looked large from the outside was mostly mundane, filled with day-to-day struggles. But if you were lucky, you got to have moments—experiences and relationships—that were so big they made the rest of your life feel large. What I had with Bhanu altered the dimension of my lifetime.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“If only she’d known then that the cycle of belief, which caused the world to work the way it did, could be broken only by disproving one lie at a time. Women were here today, where they had power, where they had a voice, because molecule by molecule, moment by moment, choice by choice, someone had called out the lies peddled as truth. It had been a boulder the size of the earth, and changing the direction of its spin couldn’t happen at one go.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“Why did human beings need love from where they wanted it rather than from where they were getting it?”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“And finding your soul mate is a gift, but losing one is not an excuse to stop living. Like”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“Love is accepting the ugliest parts of those you love.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“Life. You blink and it’s gone. The passion. The boredom. The moment lived. The moment lost. In the end, they’re just crumbs stuck in the creases of memory. Remnants of tastes left on your tongue.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“the only way to not let it win is to walk through it. You can’t walk around things without missing what’s most important about them.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“If you don’t reach for what you want, you’ll never have it. I know sometimes that feels safer than reaching for it and finding you were wrong. Or even worse, finding you were right and then losing it.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“I’ve never met anyone so complete in her own skin, someone who sees everyone else as complete too. I feel free around you,”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“No life could be large in its entirety. Even a life that looked large from the outside was mostly mundane, filled with day-to-day struggles. But if you were lucky, you got to have moments—experiences and relationships—that were so big they made the rest of your life feel large.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“I’d rather have a large life than a long one.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“You didn’t support me when I dared to dream, when I worked my butt off for it. Supporting each other is the heart of a marriage. You kept that just out of my reach, and you did it with brutal precision. I would have told a friend to leave a man for treating her that way. But I didn’t. I told myself that one worked on a marriage.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“You also know that I torture myself over how important it is for me to be liked. You knew that when you said what you said. You were making fun of my need to be liked. None of this other stuff. Only after you hurt me do you realize you’ve been a dick. Then you backtrack. But you have the need to be a dick to me, to be hurtful, and I don’t understand it. Don’t make that face. So much of our marriage was you poking a reaction out of me and me taking the bait.” “Come”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“Society’s opinions were not rules or sentencing, because there was no jury but herself. The realization wasn’t a lightning bolt. No, it had been a leak. A slow trickle that had taken years to drain her belief system and reverse it.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“A secret is a cosmic impossibility. Nothing stays eternally hidden.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“What is the point of examining your past?”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“Defining relationships and responding to them with exactly what they needed was one of her greatest skills.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“Poornima is the full moon. Auspicious. Romantic. Illuminating. Not rare, only rhythmic. Arriving every month with the dependability of breath. In, then out. Growing from a sliver to wholeness. Hiding in the dark, then blazing to full, circular glory. Only to disappear again, crescent by crescent. But always whole behind the shadows.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“I hate that everyone wants to save me from myself.” That was one of the last things Bhanu ever said to me. I wish I’d had a chance to tell her that I’d give anything to make sure she never let anyone change her even a little.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“CULLIE At first I thought I was the flame to her moth. But the burning came when I lost her. I can only hope that the people who got to be in her life knew what they had. From the journal”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“But he didn’t know what shame was. Shame was being taken for a fool when you prided yourself on being the smartest person you knew. Shame was trusting a liar when you prided yourself on trusting no one.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“We all want to be happy. And we all owe it to ourselves to try and find out what will make us happy. Even if focusing on what we can control is easier.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“I’ve never met anyone so complete in her own skin, someone who sees everyone else as complete too. I feel free around you, a deep, true freedom to be me. I’m sixty years old, Bindu, and I’ve never felt this way around anyone else in my life.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“We need to put an end to having our chains yanked because we happen to love what we do.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“What about me? If I keep forgiving you, keep making excuses for you, then what about me? When do I forgive myself for not having the self-worth to stop forgiving you over and over again, for blaming myself for not being enough. For taking that on for you?”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“She’d needed to know what she had missed. What being by herself might tell her about herself. A bead crashing to the floor. An echo of a forgotten word boomeranging back to her. Trouble.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“She always said loving yourself is a foundational requirement of knowing how to love anyone else and that most meanness in the world comes from self-loathing.”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years

“Was there a mechanism on earth with more moving parts than a marriage?”
― Sonali Dev, The Vibrant Years