Thrity Umrigar > Quotes

“Or perhaps is is that time doesn't heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones - the angle of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile - has collapsed under the weight of your griefs.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“You felt a deep sorrow, the kind of melancholy you feel when you're in a beautiful place and the sun is going down”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“ Perhaps the body has its own memory system, like the invisible meridian lines those Chinese acupuncturists always talk about. Perhaps the body is unforgiving, perhaps every cell, every muscle and fragment of bone remembers each and every assault and attack. Maybe the pain of memory is encoded into our bone marrow and each remembered grievance swims in our bloodstream like a hard, black pebble. After all, the body, like God, moves in mysterious ways.

From the time she was in her teens, Sera has been fascinated by this paradox - how a body that we occupy, that we have worn like a coat from the moment of our birth - from before birth, even - is still a stranger to us. After all, almost everything we do in our lives is for the well-being of the body: we bathe daily, polish our teeth, groom our hair and fingernails; we work miserable jobs in order to feed and clothe it; we go to great lengths to protect it from pain and violence and harm. And yet the body remains a mystery, a book that we have never read. Sera plays with this irony, toys with it as if it were a puzzle: How, despite our lifelong preoccupation with our bodies, we have never met face-to-face with our kidneys, how we wouldn't recognize our own liver in a row of livers, how we have never seen our own heart or brain. We know more about the depths of the ocean, are more acquainted with the far corners of outer space than with our own organs and muscles and bones. So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is this hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties.

But if this is true, surely the body also remembers each kindness, each kiss, each act of compassion? Surely this is our salvation, our only hope - that joy and love are also woven into the fabric of the body, into each sinewy muscle, into the core of each pulsating cell?”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“Tomorrow. The word hangs in the air for a moment, both a promise and a threat. Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking at her ankles.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“And a mother without children is not a mother at all, and if I am not a mother, than I am nothing. Nothing. I am like sugar dissolved in a glass of water. Or, I am like salt, which disappears when you cook with it. I am salt. Without my children, I cease to exist.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“Maybe, in the end, that's all that love was - doing the hard thing. Not roses and valentines and walks on the beach, but simply being present, day after ordinary day. The extraordinary romanticism of ordinary life.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“She wanted to explain everything to him—how certain notes of the Moonlight Sonata shredded her heart like wind inside a paper bag; how her soul felt as endless and deep as the sea churning on their left; how the sight of the young Muslim couple filled her with an emotion that was equal parts joy and sadness; and above all, how she wanted a marriage that was different from the dead sea of marriages she saw all around her, how she wanted something finer, deeper, a marriage made out of silk and velvet instead of coarse cloth, a marriage made of clouds and stardust and red earth and ocean foam and moonlight and sonatas and books and art galleries and passion and kindness and sorrow and ecstasy and of fingers touching from under a burqua.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“As children, we were taught to be afraid of tigers and lions. Nobody taught us what I know today - the most dangerous animal in this world is a man with wounded pride.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“All these tears shed in the world, where do they go? If one could capture all of them, they could water the parched. Then perhaps these tears would have value and all this grief would have some meaning. Otherwise, it was all a waste, just an endless cycle of birth and death; of love and loss.”
― Thrity Umrigar

“And so I have to live. Because we live for more than just ourselves, Most of the time we live for others, keep putting one foot before the other, left and right, left and right, so that walking becomes a habit, just like breathing. Ina n out, left and right.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“Her hands were empty now, as empty as her heart, which itself was a coconut shell with its meat scooped out.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“Human beings could apparently be turned into killers as effortlessly as turning a key. All one had to do was use a few buzzwords: God. Country, Religion. Honor.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The World We Found

“She is tired of it all—tired of this endless cycle of death and birth, tired of investing any hope in the next generation, tired and frightened of finding more human beings to love, knowing full well that every person she loves will someday wound her, hurt her, break her heart with their deceit, their treachery, their fallibility, their sheer humanity.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Weight of Heaven

“But you don’t love something because you’re blind to its faults, right? You love it despite its flaws.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“Liquor is the kiss of the angels as well as the curse of the devil. It can conceal but also can reveal”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“What she had believed was indignation or rage or a deep intolerance for injustice came down to this: she was irreducibly in love with this bewitching planet, this thrilling life, this heartbreaking species she belonged to, with its capacity for stupefying destruction and breathtaking magnanimity.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The World We Found

“She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“It was strange how she found out, One moment she didn't know; the next minute she did. One moment her mind was as blank as the desert; the next minute the snake of suspicion had slithered into her thoughts and raised its poisonous head.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“Because a woman can live in one of two houses—fear or love. It is impossible to live in both at the same time.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“So all I'm saying is, everything that seems important--our quarrels, or philosophical differences--in the end, it doesn't matter much. You know? In the end, what matters is what remains.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The World We Found

“So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long-ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is this hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“Being uncomfortable is good, beta. It’s in discomfort that growth happens.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“If her years as a reporter had taught her anything, it was these two things: One, the world was filled with people who were adrift, rudderless, and untethered. And two, the innocent always paid for the sins of the guilty.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“like a drop of ink in a glass of milk”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“People think that the ocean is made up of waves and things that float on top. But they forget—the ocean is also what lies at the bottom, all the broken things stuck in the sand. That, too, is the ocean.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us

“Because traditions are like eggs—once you break one, it is impossible to put it back inside its shell.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“Or perhaps it is that time doesn’t heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones—the angle of your head, the jutting of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile—has collapsed under the weight of your griefs.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us

“but her mind feels feverish as it races through the crowded hallways of the past”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us