Garima Gupta

“My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.”
― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

“He had a tongue like a razor, let us start with that. Now when you take that, and add to it eyes like a hawk, and ears like a bat, you’ve got yourself a second-to-none biographer. But add to all of that an imagination—trouble is what you’ve got then.”
― Jean-Luke Swanepoel, The Thing About Alice

“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita