Mushda Ali

“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

“Solitude: it's become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it's a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.”
― 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

“You always wanted calm seas. You used to claim you got along with everyone, that you kept to yourself, that you needed nothing from no one. But one can’t ask the sea to never swell into rage. And you asked a great deal from me.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts