Anjali Joseph > Quotes

“This was one of the secret jokes about marriage. People turned out to be exactly the opposite of how they’d seemed at first; they then went on changing randomly, as though enacting a hypothesis of unceasing chaos.”
― Anjali Joseph, Saraswati Park

“For a while those trips kept her sane amid her anxiety about conforming to a world whose rules she didn’t understand, either because there weren’t any, or because they were too multi-layered, a cascading interdependent set of priorities.”
― Anjali Joseph, Another Country

“You only saw yourself truly when you met your siblings, was that true or merely half true? It was in any case an exasperating affair, this unavoidable recognition.”
― Anjali Joseph, Saraswati Park

“…felt tired and exasperated at always being the person who, by dint of scruffiness, or youth, or not being known, must be addressed in this slightly hectoring way.”
― Anjali Joseph, Another Country

“When I’m tired things are clear. It takes the edge off. I feel like a saint in a stained-glass window, everything coming to me in a halo, revelations.”
― Anjali Joseph, The Living

“(...) I become callous and think I don’t need her approval. That’s when she stops paying me attention, and I suffocate. It’s not that she stops talking, or stops cooking, nothing obvious. She doesn’t sound angry or depressed. I just stop existing. (...) In this way she never gets whatever it is she needs; she is always brought back to earth (...) to my inadequacies (...) I do it to her every time. And then I breathe again, and am comforted, and insensitive, as before.”
― Anjali Joseph, The Living