Priya Parmar > Quotes

“I am not waiting. I am not waiting for anyone any more. It was me I was waiting for.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“A family is a messy unwieldy thing bounded only by blood andbeneath all the embarrassmentaffection.”
― Priya Parmar, Exit the Actress

“The rest of us are still living on the borrowed fuel of potential and so far have not left deep footprints. But together we carry a brackish air of importance. As if we are doing something worthy in the world. Maybe how we live our lives is the grand experiment? Mixing company, throwing out customs, using first names, waiting to marry, ignoring the rules, and choosing what to care about. Is that why we matter? Or perhaps Miss Warre-Cornish is right and we do not matter in the least.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Duncan’s hands are long and soft, with a small, neat callus on his thumb from holding a brush—the painter’s hallmark. I felt it when he shook my hand.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“I have the loose-ended feeling of looking, looking. What am I looking for? Looking for substance, looking for a moment I do not understand. Is that just how this part of life is? Do we ever have the sensation of finding, of arriving? I worry that life is always in the future and I am always here, in the preamble, straightening up the cushions so that life will go smoothly once it does begin.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Because whiteness is so often treated as invisible, as if only non-Whites are racially and ethnically positioned, White teachers often are particularly afraid to name their own positionality. Identity, including whiteness, is not absolute or fixed; rather, identity is always changing and evolving. Yet we contend that the denial of the existence of the educator’s own positionality creates more barriers and a lack of trust, especially when students are asked so often to name theirs. When an educator’s whiteness is unnamed, it remains in a dominant position, reinforcing that it is the noncolor color by which all other colors are measured.”
― Priya Parmar

“I reached out my hand to her. She had been there at the table, this sad, kind, talented woman. She had heard everything, but had been unable to speak to us.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“This house has not such an anaemic leanness as 22 Hyde Park Gate. It is more generous in its proportions, a house that takes deep, pure breaths, lives on a diet of ripe melon and cold milk, and goes for brisk walks in the early afternoon.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Do wear a corset. Don’t read too much. Do smoke cigarettes. Don’t cut my hair. Do take omnibuses. Don’t put my arms over my head. Do sleep with the window shut. Don’t eat too much.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Affection is so much easier to give when it is not owed.”
― Priya Parmar

“How I should have raised all her terrible destruction to the surface like a shipwrecked boat dredged up from the sea floor. But that would have given the fracture a shape, a dimension--a definite perimeter to the ruin. This way has a subtle cruelty. This way will torment. She will spend years trying to map the rift she caused and sound the damage. She will push on the bruise and grow frantic trying to repair the creeping remoteness. It is the unkindest thing I have ever done. And I will not relent. I will not do otherwise.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“But to begin again? No, Virginia. There can be no beginning again. Love and forgiveness are not the same thing.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“You are meant to suffer, to pine, to ache, to burn. How is the work meant to be art if it arrives without pain?”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“There were Cornish fishing boats in the harbour at Honfleur yesterday. I see them and am dissolved into a thousand late days of summer fireflies and cool Cornish water sipping the rocky beach. It comes back wholly, sensually, in a way that no active recalling of a moment can do.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“My rules are simple and clear. We must dispense with insincere politeness- that vapid veneer of untruth that smothers London drawing rooms. Our well-mannered social deceit must not die a private death but a court-ordered hanging in the public square. The archaic animal that is left will be a dangerous and hot-blooded thing. Unruly and impossible to predict. But alive.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“It is a terrible thing to grieve for someone who is not dead, not in love with someone else, but just no longer there.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“A wobbly three-legged day.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“ADRIAN STEPHEN In 1914, Adrian married Karin Costelloe, a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. When military conscription was introduced to England in 1916, the couple became conscientious objectors and spent World War I working on a dairy farm in Essex. After the war, Adrian pursued a medical degree and went on to become one of England’s first psychoanalysts. During World War II, Adrian renounced his pacifist views and volunteered as an army doctor at the age of sixty. He died in 1948.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Sometimes she arches away from me and wears a light halo of genius about her.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“ENIGMATIC. I DO NOT know if I can be friends with that word. I am not sure what word I would prefer. Instead I would like the leeway to change my word randomly and without warning. Is that normal? Surely other women would be happy to live inside one full, sweet word?”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Stay on the right side of They.”
― Priya Parmar

“He was happy. All his life. ALL his life. There is an all now: beginning and end. But then I suppose no one gets out alive.
Lately, in the last years especially, he has been so happy. Surely that is a good life? That is enough? Dear God, I hope so.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“hurled”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“I think in mass. In colour and shape and light and volume and texture. Not in words. Words delicately sewn around an abstract idea leave me feeling large and awkward and with nothing to say. What is the meaning of good? My mind asks “What is the colour of good? What size? What light? Where to put the bowl of poppies?”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“My heart wants to plunge into the open-water freshness of the richest, purest, bluest blue, and my hours are muddied with the wrangling, tangled, sparrow browns of my family.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Writing is Virginia’s engine. She thrums with purpose when she writes. Her scattershot joy and frantic distraction refocus, and she funnels into her purest form. Her centre holds until the piece is over, and she comes apart again.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Later in the evening, Virginia found her pitch. Morgan asked her about her writing, and Virginia was brief, clear, and disarming. She spoke of rightness and beauty in the unfettered, clean phrasing she prefers. Her voice broke free of its rusted shell and slid like a deep river over rocks. I watched them watch her.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Roger was not flattered, because he did not recognize what was happening. Things that do not matter to him are invisible.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“I wait for his regret, his guilt, but it does not come. He is a man who always sees the good in things. And in his mind, love is always good.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister

“Maybe how we live our lives is the grand experiment? Mixing company, throwing out customs, using first names, waiting to marry, ignoring the rules, and choosing what to care about. Is that why we matter? Or perhaps Miss Warre-Cornish is right and we do not matter in the least.”
― Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister