Ashok Ferrey Quotes

“Grief to me is a dish best eaten alone, in a cold room.”
― Ashok Ferrey, The Unmarriageable Man: A Novel

“We are so obsessed with the quick clean end, the end that takes no longer than the length of a Hollywood film, that we have invented this word 'closure' for it-hoping that the truth of of this heroic compound will follow shortly after the naming of it. If the word exists, the concept must, mustn't it? But I will tell you differently. All that exists at the end is the sheer animal act of forgetting, and the act of forgiving ourselves for forgetting. It is a physical thing born of years of harrowing repetition and replay: the road so often travelled that the scenery is no longer visible, the paragraph so often read that the sense is no longer apparent.
- Sanjay de Silva”
― Ashok Ferrey, The Unmarriageable Man: A Novel

“In Sri Lanka, nothing succeeds like death-it is the ultimate validation. The man you hate in life becomes instantly your idol in death. Any neglected artist can take heart; reviled whilst alive, he only has to wait patiently for death to become the national hero he has always yearned to be.”
― Ashok Ferrey, The Unmarriageable Man: A Novel

“no one her in the Western world has time to spare, to sit and just be with anyone else, we drinking endless cups of tea. We were all victims of some invisible timetable ordering our every movement, governing our every step.”
― Ashok Ferrey, The Unmarriageable Man: A Novel

“You only judge the quality of your life in retrospect, needing the wisdom of hindsight to assign comparative value. By then it is too damned late, because the days have slipped through your fingers. All you have left are memories, which you may tell over and over like the beads of an old woman's rosary, but they are only beads after all.”
― Ashok Ferrey, The Unmarriageable Man: A Novel

“I think you'll come to realize, Sanjay, that it's a little too much to ask for in life. To find both love and like in the same equation.”
― Ashok Ferrey, The Unmarriageable Man: A Novel