Mushda Ali

“She wants to excuse herself from a world where she often feels like an outsider, a confused and clumsy latecomer, an accidental guest who walked in through the wrong door at the wrong time.”
― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

“Is there any place we’re not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. I’m related to these related terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

“My life was life a dusty shelf in a old bookstore, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages, the only discernible change being that my body has aged another ten ages.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“The city doesn't beckon or lend me a shoulder today. Maybe it knows I'm about to leave. The sun's dull disk defeats me; the dense sky is the same one that will carry me away. The vast and vaporous territory, lacking precise pathways, is all that binds us together now. But it never preserves our tracks. The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it. The sky contains nothing of our spirit, it doesn't care. Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can't be defined.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts