Brinda Charry > Quotes

“The dead, simply by passing into death, somehow become innocent of all charges; it is we, the living, who bear the burden of guilt.

[Tony]”
― Brinda Charry, The East Indian

“but I will be my own shelter, my landing place. Like a snail, I will carry home on my back, find it where I happen to be, make it from what I bear inside me.”
― Brinda Charry, The East Indian: A Novel

“But the truth is that Lydia believed that right and wrong were thorny in this complicated place, as were truth, justice, and mercy. The one thing you can do is walk onward. There is a reason, she said, why nature did not give us eyes on the backs of our heads. What is done is done.

[Tony]”
― Brinda Charry, The Hottest Day of the Year

“When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear, sickness is catching'--so Master Shakespeare had written. Understanding, perhaps, that death and beauty go hand in hand, that death undoes love and friendship, hope and longing.

[Tony]”
― Brinda Charry

“My impulse was to strangle it, as one does with wounded things.”
― Brinda Charry, The East Indian: A Novel

“I too had to understand that previous lives are no longer accessible. That they are, in fact, quite gone. That one can learn, must learn, to live anew.”
― Brinda Charry, The East Indian: A Novel

“I wondered: dies any man ever fully know any woman? He thinks he does--she is the girl living down the lane, the girl fetching water from the communal well, the girl who speaks in accents familiar, and suddenly one day, he finds out that she has been a stranger all along, a dreamer of dreams he never suspected, a poet of verses better than his, or a more effective physician, or a saint, ultimately unavailable to him or any man.

[Tony]”
― Brinda Charry, The East Indian