Mira Jacob > Quotes

“Here is the thing, though, the real, true thing I still have trouble admitting: I can't protect you from everything...I can't protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one. I can't even protect you from the simple fact that sometimes, the people who love us will choose a world that doesn't.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“And even if Amina didn't yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“There's a particular kind of close you get when you find someone you can trust in a space you don't.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“Sometimes, you go along with it and pretend nothing happened. Sometimes, you hold your breath until the feeling of wanting to be believed passes. Sometimes, you weigh explaining against staying quiet and know they're both just different kinds of heavy.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“We think our hearts break only from endings - the love gone, the rooms empty, the future unhappening as we stand ready to step into it - but what about how they can shatter in the face of what is possible.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“Why do fathers look ungainly in their daughter's bedrooms? Like mythical beasts wandered in from the forest of another world?”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Because if you grow up to be the kind of person who asks questions about who you are, why things are the way they are, and what we could do to make them better, then you still have hope for this world, and if you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“There are small blessings, tiny ones that come unbidden and make the hard day one sigh lighter.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Nobody likes these things life hands us. But part of becoming a man is understanding how to face them head on instead of running all the time. It's time you learned how to do that.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Sometimes, you don't know how confused you are about something important until you try explaining it to someone else.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“The commodification of beauty is an economic trap designed to enslave the modern woman.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Weddings are about fantasies—you understand? Your job is to photograph the fantasy, not the reality. Never the reality. If I ever see another picture like that, you’re fired.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Like many people whose lives had formed around a particularly painful incident, she had grown used to providing ellipses around the event of her brother's death to keep conversations comfortable. At some point the subconscious logic of this had spread to the rest of her life so that she rarely talked about things she had been deeply affected by. It wasn't hard to do.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Of course he had a female following. Was there anything college girls found sexier than being told what to think?”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“We took bets on what would bring him down, which is what you do when you're trying to break your own heart before your country does it for you.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“I'm supposed to be thankful for everything. Thank you for publishing me! Thank you for asking me to attend an event! Thank you for thanking me for writing characters you could relate to despite them being Indian! Thank you for saying you almost felt like they were just normal people! [...] Thank you for telling me you wish you had been brave enough to date the Indian girls in high school! Thank you for asking me about whether or not you should take a vacation to India! Thank you for telling me that your Indian neighbor makes your hallway smell like curry! Thank you for apologizing for hating curry, like I am curry's mother!”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“What are you girls, if not my very own heart growing up once and for all?”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Once, before I had you, I saw you. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. I was pregnant and standing alone outside a party, and when you kicked, I shut my eyes and saw you on a beach we would arrive at almost five years later. You were facing the water and wearing your blue swimsuit and I knew, from the curve in your spine and the nut brown of your skin, that you were mine to protect like nothing else ever will be.
So when you first started asking me hard questions, the ones about America and your place here, I wanted to find you the right answers - the kind that would make you feel good, welcome, and loved. I thought if I could just remember the country I'd been raised to believe in, the one I was sure I would eventually get to, I'd be able to get us back there.
Here is the thing, though, the real, true thing I still have trouble admitting: I can't protect you from everything. I can't protect you from becoming a brown man in America. I can't protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one. I can't even protect you from the simple fact that sometimes, the people who love us will choose a world that doesn't.
Even now, just writing that down, I want to say something that will make it okay, or even make it make sense, but I can't. Will they ever really understand it themselves? Will they ever change? I have no idea. Our burden is how much we might love them anyway.

And this is maybe the part I worry about the most, how the weight of that will twist you into someone you don't want to be, or worse, make you ashamed of your own heart. I hope you will remember that you have nothing to be ashamed of. I hope you will remember that your heart is a good one, and that your capacity to feel love, in all its complexity, is a gift.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“Why is it that fathers so often ensure the outcome they are trying to avoid? Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect? Did Thomas know, Amina wondered as she watched him, that he had just done the human equivalent of a lion sinking his teeth into his own cub?”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Oh," she said, covering her face with her hand. It was not an oh of disappointment or an oh of surprise but an oh that Amina had never heard before, scraped raw with an emotion Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire. She watched as Paige crossed Akhil's room, undistracted by all the usual things that stopped people- the Greats, his desk, the leather jacket hanging from his chair- and moved straight for his hamper, which she opened up, pulling out a forgotten T-shirt and crushing it into her face. "Oh,", she said again, muffled. Oh. And even if Amina didn't yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“A collection of takeout boxes slumped together like old men in bad weather.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Thank God for Saturday mornings. A reprieve from the familiar, a day unworn by routines. Anything was possible.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“I mean, if you’re really plunging—you said plunging, right?—into this book, then tethering yourself to every single guidepost along the way isn’t really going to make that happen.” Mr. Tipton’s mirth was palpable. “So you think critical reading is a useless activity? That your classmates are just, what, not experiencing the book?” “I think the best way to experience this book is to let it happen to you and think about what it all means later.” “Later when?” “Later when you’re a high school English teacher.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Kicked out for what?" Amina asked, and Dimple smiled like she'd won the $25,000 question.
"Atheism."
A small murmur went up in the room, followed by a few nervous glances. While everyone knew better than to actually believe in God, the outright denial of one seemed dangerous and possibly gauche”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Because if you grow up to be the kind of person who asks questions about who you are, why things are the way they are, and what we could do to make them better, then you still have hope for the world.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“I was scared to open my mouth. I was scared I would start yelling, and if I started yelling she would be scared of me, and if she was scared of me, she would be right about me.”
― Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

“He’s fine,” Kamala said. “It’s not like that. You’re not listening.” “I am listening! You just told me he’s delusional, and I’m asking—” “I DID NOT SAY HE IS DELUSIONAL. I SAID HE WAS TALKING TO HIS MOTHER.” “Who is dead,” Amina said gently. “Obvious.” “And that’s not delusional?”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“They were turning now, panning past the Sandias, the black-green crags and rocky faces, the ribbon of road leading to the white crest. Amina looked down on Albuquerque, the light bouncing off the sprawling tile of houses and pools, the cars running along the highways like busy insects. She imagined all of it gone, undone, erased back to 1968, when the city was nothing but eighty miles of hope huddling in a desert storm. She imagined Kamala on the tarmac, walking toward a life in the desert, her body pulled forward by faith and dirty wind.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“She shuddered. Pee talkers baffled her. How could they do that? Give you no opportunity to not listen?”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing