Anantha Lakshmi > Anantha's Quotes

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“Can I ask you a personal question"? Of all the rhetorical questions
in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its
simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about
to follow.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses: A Gripping Mother-Daughter Story of Political Activism, Crime, and Suspense in Modern-Day Pakistan

“The next day it's Virginia Woolf who wafts through. Hers is a
curiously insistent presence; take your eyes off her for a moment and
the next thing you know she's rearranging your syntax as though it
were cutlery improperly laid out for a seven-course meal with some
foreign dignitary who disdains your nation's table manners.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses: A Gripping Mother-Daughter Story of Political Activism, Crime, and Suspense in Modern-Day Pakistan

“There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses: A Gripping Mother-Daughter Story of Political Activism, Crime, and Suspense in Modern-Day Pakistan

“We are doorways, openings into something greater than ourselves, something that we don't understand and will never understand. We have nothing precious in and of ourselves. We are only precious in that we are part of something that is too big to know.”
― Eleanor Morse, White Dog Fell from the Sky

“Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food.
I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Arrange your face”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Food is good for the nerves and the spirit. Courage comes from the belly – all else is desperation.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”
― Danielle LaPorte

“Fay had a spot of blood on the left side of her mouth and I took a wet cloth and wiped it off. Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office