Tahmima Anam > Quotes

“Before placing her in her mother's arms, she whispered, as she had at all the other births, hello, little amphibian. Someone had to acknowledge the strangeness of this soul, and the distance it had traversed, millions and millions of years, in order to be here.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

“Rehana regarded the saris and tried to recall the feeling they had given her, of being at once enveloped and set free, the tight revolutions of material around her hips and legs limiting movement, the empty space between blouse and petticoat permitting unexpected sensations -- the thrill of a breeze that has strayed low, through an open window, the knowledge of heat in strange places, the back, the exposed belly. It was the bringing together of night and day....”
― Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age

“It was like that with her mother – memory upon memory stacked together like the feathers in a wild bird, there to keep her warm, or when she needed to, fly. She was the wings of her, the very wings.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

“This war that has taken so many sons has spared mine. This
age that has burned so many daughters has not burned mine.
I have not let it.”
― Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age

“Diana accuses me of losing my sense of history. The hands that arrange her bones, that brush away the layers of earth that weighed heavy on her for fifty million years, those hands should be light and unattached, not heartsick, that embarrassing word, not longing for human touch, for the particular grooves of another person's lifetline, but something else entirely, a pair of moving parts mindful of all that is ancient, and endures. I bristle at her rebuke, knowing she is right.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Bones of Grace

“How very close it is to illness. The loose, restless limbs. The feverish cheeks. The burning salt of the heart. The prickle of sweat. Love.”
― Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age

“Did I regret Cyrus’s whiteness? Truth be told, sometimes I did. If Cyrus was Bengali, I wouldn’t have to explain why chewing on the end of a drumstick was perhaps the best part of a meal, or why there were outside clothes and inside clothes and in-between clothes that you wore when you got home but weren’t ready for bed. I wouldn’t have to explain all the complicated rules about where you can and can’t put your feet, and that he could maybe kiss me in front of my parents but not on the mouth and certainly never with tongue. But what I found infinitely worse was trying to gauge whether a man had just the right amount of brown in him. He had to know about drumsticks and shoes and not hate himself, but he also couldn’t be too in love with his mother or imagine that I would change more diapers than him or ever, ever be charmed by the thought of me in a hijab. He had to be three parts Tagore, one part Drake, one part e e cummings, and that’s not even getting into whether I got a rise from smelling his face. So no, I didn’t want to ponder Cyrus’s whiteness, I just wanted to enjoy his scent and his perfectly sized dick and the fact that, of all the people I had ever met in my whole life, he felt the most like home.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Her hands on the harmonium were delicate, square-tipped, her bitten-down nails paying homage to the seriousness of the task; her brows were knitted together in the service of the song, and in the end it was only to the music that she was bound. In singing she was, in only briefly, a supplicant, as though in the presence of a divinity that even she, devout non-believer, had to somehow acknowledge”
― Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age

“...it's just a matter of time, and the words, before you return to me, knowing, in fact, that the possibility of our ever being together will require an altogether less linear, less knowable set of possibilities, an alchemy of which I am neither the scientist nor the author. (p. 150)”
― Tahmima Anam

“all the great love stories are about two people bringing the story of their yesterdays and the story of their todays into one epic sewn-together poem, and that is what they mean when they say lightning strikes.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I’m stammering now, but I keep going. “ ‘He’s otherworldly but handsome in an almost comical way. His sentences are long, and when you’re in the middle of one, you wonder, where is this going? But he always manages to bring whatever he’s saying to a satisfying conclusion. Everything he says is mysterious and somehow obvious at the same time.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“It spies on you. It mines you for data. It extracts your soul and then sells it back to you. It’s designed to make you spend money so you’re too busy shopping to notice the world is burning down.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“There was only one thing to do, she decided: make pickles. The mangoes on the tree were just about ready: grassy-green and
tongue-smackingly sour. She asked the boys to pick them from the tree. When they were younger, this was the children’s job. Maya was by far the better climber: her foot would curl over the branches and hold her fast, while she stretched her arms and plucked the fruit, throwing it down to Rehana, who kept shouting, ‘Be careful! Be careful!’

She would slice the green mangoes and cook them slowly with chillies and mustard seeds. Then she would stuff them into jars and leave them on the roof to ripen. There was a rule about not touching pickles during the monthlies. She couldn’t remember who had told her that rule – her mother? – no, her mother had probably never sliced a mango in her brief, dreamy life. Must have been one of her sisters. Marzia, she was the best cook. And the enforcer of rules. But Rehana had decided long ago this was a stupid rule. It was hard enough to time the pickle-making
anyway, between the readiness of the fruit and the weather, which had to be hot and dry.

As she recited the pickle recipe to herself, Rehana wondered what her sisters would make of her at this very moment. Guerrillas at Shona. Sewing kathas on the rooftop. Her daughter at rifle practice. The thought of their shocked faces made her want to laugh. She imagined the letter she would write. Dear
sisters, she would say. Our countries are at war; yours and mine.
We are on different sides now. I am making pickles for the war effort. You see how much I belong here and not to you.”
― Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age

“Whenever Cyrus feels overwhelmed, like on the anniversary of his mother’s death or after arguing with Jules and Asha, he tends to disappear. Why do you think this is this coping mechanism, and what consequences does it have on his relationship with Asha? What did you make of Cyrus’ apology and surprise announcement in Chapter Fifteen? In the end, Asha admits to herself that she gave Cyrus power over her. How much do you agree with Asha’s assessment of what went wrong? How do you feel about Asha’s overall growth, and her willingness to fix what’s broken at WAI? Is it fair for the responsibility of rebuilding to fall on her?”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I was ready to start a life with Cyrus, who was everything he had been all those years ago when I first met him: mostly human, a little bit cartoon, a tiny bit ghost.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Bettina often joked that I was in the wrong department, but there was something pleasantly straightforward about scientists, and I found that I could live among them without giving much away, and in those days, hiding in plain sight was what I did best.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Bones of Grace

“Teachers are our most intimate acquaintances for a period of our lives, but the relationship is tilted toward us; they mute themselves in order to act as a conduit for our growth.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“We made something magnificent. We disrupted the very thing that was seemingly fixed—the way people handled the most intimate moments of their lives. We gave them something they didn’t even know they wanted, and once we’d given it to them, nothing was ever the same again. We were revolutionaries. We were radicals. We had upended the order of things.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“think fake nails are the modern equivalent of foot binding. That and Botox.” “At least with Botox you can still wipe your”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Whoever invented this thing, I don’t know you personally, but I am writing to say that I’ve just had a lifechanging experience. It sounds stupid to claim this from just a few minutes on your site, but my mother died last year and honestly I’ve been to every priest,”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“She didn’t think of the debt she was repaying, that each of the babies she brought into the world might someday be counted against the babies that had died, by her hand, after the war.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

“You give us permission to access all your social media accounts in the event of your death,” Marco says. “We close things down, write to all your friends, inform everyone about your final wishes. It’s like a will, except for your online presence.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Teachers are our most intimate acquaintance for a period of our lives, but the relationship is tilted toward us; they mute themselves in order to act as a conduit for our growth.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“But what if they also had the one thing that humans possessed only on rare occasions? What if they had an intrinsic, automatic, unflinching, couldn’t-be-switched-off understanding of other people? What if they had empathy? Then they wouldn’t be our rivals, they would”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Because I had made a promise to myself that I would no longer waste time doubting the greatness of a thing that was right in front of me.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“People need to hold on to something,” I tell him. I am thinking about my mother, how for years she had refused to enter a mosque, but lately, I’ve found her peppering her sentences with “Inshallah, God willing,” and once I even caught her kneeling on the carpet in her bedroom, her body angled in a direction which I assumed was east, toward Mecca. “When they get old, or when something bad happens to them, people need belief systems.” “So we’re just going to create one more thing for people to blindly follow.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Why don’t you act like all the other aunties?” “Don’t insult me. I’m not like the other aunties. That’s why you and Mira turned out to be such brilliant young women.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“I can’t help but feel like every little success is a small fuck-you to all the people who glanced ugly at my mother in her sari in Walmart, or mispronounced my name even though it was only four letters long, or said something casually racist and then said, “But I don’t mean you.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“The thing is, we talk about people working themselves to death, but we never say ‘He hobbied himself to death.’ Still, there must be a lot of people who do that.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife