Chinar Mehta

“she didn’t tell them she’d taken her father for granted and carried her blinkered, self-righteous perspective of him from childhood through to his death, when in fact he’d done nothing wrong except fail to live up to her feminist expectations of him”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“I had never asked my mother about my father. She had not forbidden it; even if I’d had a general feeling that such questions were discouraged, I had no memory of my mother saying, Be quiet, never speak of it again. Had I been a coward? Indifferent, too absorbed in the petty present to care? Or perhaps I’d believed there’d be endless time for the confusions my knowledge might bring. However it came to pass, at a certain point it became too late to ask such questions—too late because it seemed I should already know their answers, and so an admission of ignorance would be an admission of great carelessness—and then (from shame? from sloth?) I turned father into a concept, an emptiness so abstract it was as good as dead.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“gender is one of the biggest lies of our civilization”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other