Meghna Pant > Quotes

“I festered with this duality of love and ego, where ego scorns the very love its seeking and then despairs in its absence.”
― Meghna Pant

“Death did this to people: making cowards, scapegoats, preachers and mourners of the living; while the dead – ignoble or not – became objects of respect for achieving something before the rest of us.”
― Meghna Pant

“Death has become so predictable that I have neither the youthful reverence of it nor the middle-age fear.”
― Meghna Pant, Happy Birthday!

“Perhaps the only way to love is to bury yourself so deeply in it that you avoid its very suffering.”
― Meghna Pant

“Yet, despite their many surgeries and jobs, most of them looked like old girls – girls who had suffered some wasting disease. These same things, breasts and botox, like independence and immodesty, had been powerful and shameful a few short years back, put in the same category as an extra toe or a stutter; they were quaint now.”
― Meghna Pant

“She gave her a long embrace, like pie baking in the warmth of an oven.”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife

“In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife

“In Indian society every institution – prayer, education, family, beauty, chastity and career – was a rung of the ladder of life, which had to be climbed to reach the top rung, marriage.”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife

“Of all the roles she’d played – daughter, student, employee, sister and wife – wife was the smallest and in proportion the most difficult, as though it had run out of steam with its own scale. The word ‘wife’ was too small to accommodate its responsibility.”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife

“Her young soul felt cut up like a fifty-year-old, like a squirrel that appeared content, but carried scars from the vestige of time in its black and gray grooves.”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife

“Their marriage hadn’t died dramatically. There were no adulterous truants or burst spleens or freakish lightning strikes or splattered brains over the highway. Their marriage had died of neglect and errors and abrasiveness. It died under a long protracted illness for which there was a diagnosis but no remedy. The disease had no name. So how could she explain it to others?”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife

“All marriages were a consequence of security, tradition, money and beauty. Love was a chance, a lucky coincidence. Its existence was an after-thought, for more serious matters cemented marriage.”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife

“Like a Persian carpet the weave of time pushed their lives into a pattern.”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife

“She stood above the sink and broke the Swarovski glass frame – a wedding gift – with her hands. Her thumb got cut. As blood drops fell into the sink, like mercury balls she thought, she lit the photo on fire. Ashes fell into the sink. Fire and vermilion. Ashes and blood. Her marriage from start to finish.”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife

“I have learnt that a good marriage is healing for the soul, something to relish. But a bad marriage is long-suffering, a thing to be endured. The only good thing about marriage is that it’s perishable like human life.”
― Meghna Pant, One and a Half Wife