Brotherless Night Quotes

“Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“You can’t just stay in the house studying. You have to see the world yourself—don’t let others tell you what it looks like.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“Evil is not limited by what you personally can imagine.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“A working-class girl who narrowly escaped assault filed a complaint,” Anjali wrote. “For her bravery and honesty, much of Jaffna thanked her with rumour.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“You must understand: There is no single day on which a war begins. The conflict will collect around you gradually, the way carrion birds assemble around the vulnerable, until there are so many predators that the object of their hunger is not even visible. You will not even be able to see yourself in the gathering crowd of those who would kill you.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“Turn a dead boy into a militant and his death is excusable, you see. Every Tamil boy born in the year I was born was acceptable collateral damage.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“I go only to return," I said because Tamil has no words for last goodbyes.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“Don’t ever say that again,” she said. “That you’d rather die. I had five children, and only two of you are with me, and God knows where your father is, so when I tell you to do it, Sashikala, you had better get in.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“We were not from the same place or the same community, but she understood me so well that with her, I had neither to explain nor conceal myself.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“But then the lights winked out across the peninsula, as boy after boy I had known and loved was extinguished or gone.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“But we could no longer bear the discrimination of a government dominated by the majority Sinhalese, the Tamil politicians declared: no more second-class status for our language, double standards and quotas for Tamil students, government-run Sinhala colonization schemes in traditionally Tamil areas, no more government-fomented anti-Tamil violence. The 1958 riots had taken place ten”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“So we were not friends at first, although he had already been more intimate with me than any other boy I had known.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“Many people have died there: some killed by the Sri Lankan Army and the state, some by the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and some by the Tamil separatists, whom you know as the terrorists. Many people, of course, have also lived.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“His chest rose; his chest stilled, and once more I anticipated its descent. I waited, and the space of that wait grew infinite.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“I had first come to appreciate precision as a form of love during my time as a zoology student, under Sir's tutelage, but since those days I had found it in other, unexpected places, I saw it in that room, in that girl. Her attention to each devasted mother was total, her eyes huge and focused.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“There are no microphones, no stage, no crowds, no priests, no clear signs of what has taken place here, except for all the survivors who know it did. You must understand: this is not the book for which Anjali died. You can find that book in your library. This is the one next to it on the shelf. I can promise you there will be another, and another. Whose stories will you believe? For how long will you listen? Tell me why you think you are here, and that will be as true as anything I can say.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“As the Aragalaya movement continues, and as people struggle to live in Sri Lanka, I write in solidarity from Minneapolis.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“I have no affection for the dramatic, and so I describe it to you plainly, as it was: a man in a grey building, behind a desk, as ordinary-looking as so many other men and so many other desks in New York, telling me that tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent people were going to be killed, and that there was nothing either of us could do, even though neither of us had any greater purpose than standing in the way of such a thing.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“Do you know how many people are in the No-Fire Zone?” I asked him. “The government is shelling although they know civilians are there, and the movement is holding people hostage.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“First Aran had wanted me not to support the militants, and then he had wanted me to protect myself, to be his sister before being an activist, and in both parts of my life I had failed him. I could not apologise. Still he came for me, and I understood that after all, he loved me.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“I can’t tell people to be responsible for their choices and then make yours for you.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“Of course the Tigers wanted the Indians to leave. They had never intended to disarm or to abide by the terms of an agreement they had not negotiated directly.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“The Tamil civilians, who had originally welcomed their arrival, quickly realised that rather than finding relief from the Tamil militants and the Sri Lankan forces, they had invited yet another antagonist into the room.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“The British are known for their tea, but honestly, it was awful. Strange, considering they get the export quality. Do sit down.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“my grandmother left, we became unable to talk to each other, perhaps because we had nothing to say except to blame each other and ourselves for what had happened.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“Now the language of instruction was Tamil; although I spoke excellent English, I could not say a word in Sinhala. My future depended on a language I did not know, no one wanted to teach me, and, on principle, I did not want to learn.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“You won’t read about that anywhere,” the driver says. “That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“FOR TWENTY YEARS IT was like that. I delivered a stream of information to the United Nations, and they listened”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night

“If you have ever told such a lie, you know that when dreaming of another self, you will reach first for the name of someone you love.”
― V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night