Meera Syal > Quotes

“But tonight I finally made the connection that change always strolled hand in hand with loss, with upheaval, and that I would always feel it keenly because in the end, I did not live under the same sky as most other people. (p179)”
― Meera Syal, Anita and Me

“I am the genuine article, therefore I don't have to try. I just have to be. You, on the other hand, have to try any passing bandwagon, because what else have you got? ”
― Meera Syal, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

“Maybe that’s what love meant, both people thinking they were the lucky one.”
― Meera Syal, Anita and Me

“Every path leads to the same god.”
― Meera Syal, Anita and Me

“...attack being the best form of defence, and never ever show that you might be in pain. That would only invite more violence because pity was for wimps and wimps could not survive round here”
― Meera Syal, Anita and Me

“My best friend in all the world really did have a boyfriend and had never told me. My best friend was sharing me with someone else and I knew whatever she had been giving me was only what she had left over from him, the scraps, the tokens, the lies. I had fought for this friendship, worried over it, made sacrifices for it, measured myself against it, lost myself inside it, had little to show for it but this bewildered sense of betrayal. Now I knew that I had never been the one she loved, I was a convenient diversion, a practice run until the real thing came along to claim her.”
― Meera Syal, Anita and Me

“I had seen how in an instant, those you called friends could suddenly become tormentors, sniffing out a weakness or a difference, turning their own fear of ostracism into a weapon with which they could beat the victim away, afraid that being an outsider, and individual even, was somehow infectious.”
― Meera Syal, Anita and Me

“... no one wanted to think about the gangs of no-hope teenagers who already took over the nearby park all day, drinking lager and waiting for something to happen to them, trapped in a forgotten village in no-man’s land between a ten-shop town and an amorphous industrial sprawl.”
― Meera Syal, Anita and Me

“I saw everything crumble around me, every single daydream of wandering through the grammar school cloisters citing poetry, of my parents wiping tears away as I went up on a platform to receive yet another prize for Debating Skills or Most Graceful Netball Player, of sitting in the garden of our new bungalow being applauded by my Aunties and Uncles as the first family member to win a university scholarship and meet a future husband on the same day - all that potential, all that hope, all gone because I made friends once with Anita Rutter.”
― Meera Syal, Anita and Me

“But I've always been a sucker for a good double entendre; the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied, is a place in which I have always found myself. I'm really not a liar, I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong.(p10)”
― Meera Syal

“Only tiny kindnesses, but the ones that counted, the million little mercies we take for granted, the mundane gestures that keep us, tentatively, together.”
― Meera Syal, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

“...smoke, spattered with grey-black debris, coming faster and thicker, eager to escape the brick maw and billow across the unbroken sky.
'Go on...go!' Tania said, exhilarated, raising her arms above her, scattering the sparrows from the trees, who fluttered through the grey snow and beyond it, singing their journey as they flew.”
― Meera Syal , Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

“that you didn’t work just for the money, you worked for the freedom work gave you, for the chance to be a stronger, more interesting version of yourself.”
― Meera Syal, The House of Hidden Mothers: A Novel

“vanilla tears were making their way down the rippled orange cone on to the little girl’s fingers.”
― Meera Syal, The House of Hidden Mothers: A Novel