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“Having already been in the process of filing him away, burying him with the other men who evaporate after pulverizing my cervix, I am relieved, and yes, I am ashamed. I want to say that I am not that kind of girl. Portable, contorting herself over an inaccessible, possibly disinterested man, but what if I am? There are worse things - factory farming and Christian rock and the three-dimensional animation of Mr. Clean. Because maybe I don't want to be cool. Maybe I want to be all-purpose. Maybe I can't pretend to be aloof to men who are aloof to me. So I text him two hundred words' worth of things I know about baboons and I play Rebecca's voicemail again with this exchange still fresh.”
― Luster
― Luster
“... I have come to the part of the night where I am incapable of any uppercase emotion, and every circuit responsible for my cellular regeneration has begun to smoke.”
― Luster
― Luster
“It was as if, at such times, he was permanently suspended in the blissful but always vanishing space between desire and satisfaction. In that region of the self that one is no longer anguished by the absence of something one feels to be necessary for one's salvation but not yet saddened by the disappointment that attainment of desire always seemed to bring. For strong desire, desire that radiates outward through all the regions of the body, always seemed to involve the hope or belief that attainment of the object of desire whether a person, place, or situation will change everything completely, will end all absence and yearning, all effort and struggle. That it will stem somehow the slow sad passage of time.”
― A Passage North
― A Passage North
“He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who've simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead.”
―
―
“In Delhi and many of the Hindi-speaking states more generally male stares were different, were intensely unselfconscious and intensely unrelenting, so that even when you weren't being harassed in more explicit verbal or physical ways you still had to use all of your psychological resources to resist these gazes over the course of each day, to prevent these men from trying to enter your soul through your eyes, like strangers who enter the privacy of your house without permission and without even bothering to take off their shoes. You had to employ these psychological resources so constantly over the course of the day, losing even the freedom to think autonomously in your own mind, that by the time you returned home you were always utterly exhausted. The cumulative effect of years of being subject to these gazes was that women who lived in the capital had learned to curb the movement of their own eyes to remarkable degrees, restricting their gazes in public spaces to areas where their eyes couldn't be intercepted, toward their feet or their laps or into the screen of their phones...”
― A Passage North
― A Passage North
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